Original publication date: March, 2006
Two weeks ago, there was a city-wide power outage in Santa Barbara, California. Softshare's North American network, which operates out of Santa Barbara, was impacted by the unexpected outage.
But the impact on our clients was minimal. That's because Softshare automatically switches our North American network operations over to our European network operations in response to power failures or other unforeseeable events. Similarly, a distressing event in Amsterdam, where our European network resides, would cause an automatic switch of European network operations to our North American network operations.
Our Santa Barbara and Amsterdam network data centers mirror each other, with all Softshare mailbox traffic stored at both centers—and always available for access from either center. If you are a Softshare Vista or ECS user, the network you access is determined by the Softshare server you are referencing in your communications configurations. For example, if you are using the server host name of mail.us.softshare.com to retrieve your Softshare mail, you are accessing a server in Santa Barbara. If you are using mail.eu.softshare.com, you are accessing a server in Amsterdam. If you are using mail.softshare.com, which doesn't specifically imply which data center to connect to, Softshare dynamically routes you to the server physically closest to your location.
But, regardless of the location of the Softshare server you are accessing, as long as you are using a fully qualified host name, and not an IP address to reference the server, Softshare can automatically switch your operations between our North American and European networks. In other words, your network traffic is safe with us.