OTTAWA, Feb. 25 — Canadian technology and architectural design will be put to the test in one of the harshest environments on earth on the upcoming Kanatek-sponsored assault on Mount Everest.
When they arrive at base camp at 17,575 feet, a party of Canadian climbers and researchers from Ryerson University and the University of Ottawa will set up a wireless network with a satellite link back to Ottawa. The network will consist of wired and wireless laptops, including rugged laptops designed for harsh conditions. The network will allow the researchers to swap files and back up data on other laptops. Also included in the network is a videoconferencing unit to allow visual communication with researchers back in Ottawa and Toronto.
The Everest base camp network will be linked to a disaster recovery site at Kanatek's offices in Ottawa, via an ISDN satellite phone, where the data will be backed up and archived, to provide a robust infrastructure for data retention and disaster recovery. This means that the research data developed by the universities has four levels of redundancy — the user's laptop, other laptops at base camp, the Backup server at Kanatek in Ottawa and the backup tape library unit in Ottawa.
Kanatek Technologies, a Canadian storage integrator specializing in disaster-recovery environments, designed the architecture.
The expedition party leaves on March 25 and is led by Sean Egan, a mountaineer and professor in the School of Human Kinetics at the University of Ottawa, and Peter Luk, director of the School of Business Management at Ryerson University. Accompanying the climbing expedition for three weeks is a party of hikers that includes senior IT executives from private and public Canadian organizations and leaders from the Ryerson University Business School. The expedition is sponsored by Kanatek and co-sponsored by ProCurve Networking by HP, and SkyWave Mobile Communications, a provider of satellite-based asset tracking, monitoring, and control.
