The Regional Field Technology Services (RFTS) is enhancing their service delivery at the Entebbe Support Base (UNESB) and Regional Service Centre Entebbe (RSCE) through their Horizontal Project.

The Horizontal Project is a fiber installation project around the UNESB/RSCE compound aimed at providing a self-healing ring (Redundancy) around the campus.

Self-healing in the sense that one-half of the ring provides connectivity for users to the two data centers at any one time. The other half remains redundant and comes into use in case of failure of the first half (Automatic failover). Horizon Failover project seamlessly and automatically switches to a reliable backup network system. 

“The aim of the project is to enable the delivery of more reliable services to the staff of UNESB/RSCE and to deliver high availability of FTS services. This will help achieve failover and reduce or eliminate negative user impact.” Said Dilip Sehgal, Transmission and Infrastructure Support, RFTS

The installation includes an outdoor cabinet which is a termination point from the two data centers and gives connectivity to the different blocks providing more reliable uplinks and reliability of FTS services.  

This configuration ensures a more resilient service provision for clients meaning minimal downtime of data services. This will improve the uptime of services since all our clients are dependent on FTS services availability and the high availability of FTS services is the one essential criterion that the organization cannot afford to ignore. The most critical benefit of the failover system is downtime protection of FTS services.

“What this Failover system means for us at the RSCE is that we shall have no downtime at all and we will be reachable by our clients at all times of the day. Being a Service Centre, it is key that we are available to our clients at all times and this seamless switchover will allow us to achieve that,” Paulin Djomo, Director a.i. RSCE