COPS Monitoring Bulletin Newsletter #39

Being the leading monitoring provider for you and your customers requires a relentless commitment to continually reinvest in our technology and infrastructure. We are constantly performing R&D, programming and implementing leading- technology to provide fast and reliable lifesaving monitoring services that your company can stand behind. You should have high expectations from your monitoring provider to not only progress with technical, performance, and reliability demands - but also to anticipate them in advance. At COPS, we continue to do just that. In fact, we are currently reinvesting nearly $150,000 per month back into our company’s technology each month. It wasn't too long ago that we made the decision to share details of our investments in our future together, beginning with a $2 million investment that included several upgrades to our infrastructure to keep COPS ahead of the technology curve. Among several items, this investment included being the first and only professional monitoring company to deploy redundant servers in an off-site data center to provide an extra level of business continuity and disaster preparedness that other monitoring companies just don't have. Then, less than a year ago, we shared information about another $1 million investment in our dedicated MPERS dispatch center; state- of-the-art Cisco Meraki switches, firewalls, and cybersecurity; two massive new generators in New Jersey, and a new uninterruptible power supply (UPS/Battery Backup) in Florida. (You can read about these in the Bulletin Newsletters at copsmonitoring.com/bulletin ). Today, we're sharing some of the details about our latest $1 million investment in our future together: First, we upgraded our Avaya phone switches at all 6 of our monitoring centers . We selected Avaya switches and have used them for more than a decade because they're known globally as a leader in reliable communications and as a pioneer in elevating connectivity with innovative solutions. The new Avaya R8 platform delivers greater speed, redundancy, security, and features that reduce our reliability on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and enhances our ability to withstand service outages at our individual monitoring centers. With the addition of Avaya Breeze, we have the unprecedented ability to design, create, and deploy advanced integration with our proprietary Generations alarm monitoring software and other systems to utilize flexible tools that will more quickly identify your customers, intelligently route calls to enhance services, and improve time-saving efficiencies so we can continue to deliver the world-class service you and your customers demand. Next, we turbo-charged Generations and MPower by upgrading our Storage Area Network (SAN) arrays from traditional hard drives (HDD) to the Solid State Drives (SSD) and doubled the processing memory of our NJ and NV Generations systems. This $600K+ investment has an enorrmous positive impact because it essentially improves all services we provide. Everything from alarm monitoring, to data entry, to reporting, to MPower and other connected platforms relying on programming and data stored on a drive. SSDs take computing to the next level by eliminating all moving parts, increasing data transfer time, and significantly improving reliability. To give you an idea of all the benefits, we put together the table to the right. Finally, we outfitted our NJ computer room with a state-of-the- art cooling system from STULZ – the world's leading solution provider of energy efficient temperature and humidity management technology, designed specifically for mission critical applications. Now, we have 3 separate units, all with separate thermostats, on dedicated power feeds for redundancy, and reliability. All told, these projects had to be meticulously planned and executed over the course of months to ensure not down time. We don't think this $1 million investment was by any means "over the top" and rest assured, it certainly won't be our last investment/ improvement in our ongoing goal to continue to be the best monitoring provider to you and your customers. RELIABLE MONITORING REQUIRES A STEADFAST COMMITMENT TO REINVEST IN THE COMPANY OUR LATEST $1 MILLION INVESTMENT IN OUR FUTURE TOGETHER SSD SolidStateDrive WHAT IS SSD? SSD (Solid State Drive) is a new generation of storage device which differs from traditional mechanical hard disks by using flash-based memory, and has no moving parts WHAT IS HDD? Developed in the 1950s, HDD (Hard Disk Drive), is the most commonly used type of computer storage, but is limited in performance because of its mechanical nature FASTER ACCESS TIME The time it takes before a drive can access its data .1 ms SSD access times are virtually non- existent 5.5 – 8.0 ms HDD access times can be 55 to 80 times slower IMPROVED PERFORMANCE SSDs are considered 15 times faster than HDDs (Input/output operations per second) 6000 io/s No moving parts 400 io/s Continually spins at 7200RPM ENERGY SAVINGS 100s of watts can be saved in a single NAS array 2 – 5 watts 1/3 power requirements of HDD 6 – 15 watts 3X power requirements of SSD CPU POWER SAVINGS SSDs free up 6% of CPU for other operations 1% 7% LOWER FAILURE RATE 100+ of watts can be saved in a single SAN <0.5% Up to 10X more reliable 2 – 5% 4-10X higher failure rate SPACE SAVINGS 2.5" Smaller drives means more storage in the same footprint 3.5" Require more power & cooling Smaller HDD drives spin at a lower RPM & have slower performance FASTER I/O REQUEST TIMES SSDs allow for much faster data access 20 ms 20 – 25X faster than HDD Up to 400 – 500 ms During backups & large data jobs breeze ™