Minus a few minor growing pains here and there, it went very well and we couldn’t be happier and we hope that you are as well.

Here is the skinny on who, what, when and why…

We have been using the same Network Operation Center (NOC) for the past 20 years. We stayed there because we loved how they operated and what they stood for. Sadly, the person who make that team who they were, suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. Things changed and we didn’t like the path that they were now heading down. So it became time to consider a move. We wanted to upgrade to a new server because the then current server was getting old and it was just time for an upgrade. Things were not working out so we made the choice to make a big change.

We not only moved to a new server, but we moved our servers from Jacksonville, Florida to Dallas, Texas. Selecting a location for a NOC is not an easy task for us. We want to make sure that we select a location that is not going to be down often due to any type of natural disaster. But it goes beyond a natural disaster, but an outage can also be from things like a simple power outage, to political issues like the riots that happened years ago like those in Minneapolis in 2020 or Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020. Choosing how the power grid is setup and so many other factors.

We also decided to change some technology, to include how the servers are setup, connected and operating. Everything was designed to take SWS to the future and beyond.

The end result is that we have new servers in a new NOC in a new location, being managed by a new team. We manage the operations of the servers, but the NOC team manages the hardware, the network and the facility. This is a huge part of keeping the servers operational. If a drive fails, they address it for us, if there is a power issue, they address it for us. We handle the rest on our end, which makes for a solid setup.