Redundancy | IT in AV

Redundancy | IT in AV

This month's theme is trade shows and webinars. When I think about trade shows and webinars there is this recurring theme that keeps coming up. I am a person who looks forward to events as I enjoy learning and seeing tech. I do know there are folks out there who feel yearly trade shows and all the webinars are more redundant. Due to the information being repeated across all these events, some folks prefer to limit their attendances as they are not gaining anything new.  When these folks talk about redundancy I get the feeling they are making it out to be a bad thing. Coming from IT redundancy is a good thing; mainly when considering up-time. This brings me to this article and redundancy in AV.

Redundancy in IT

When we talk about redundancy in IT we are talking about the core systems. If you enter a data center you will find redundancy in power, uplink, core routers, and vital systems just to name a few. These redundancies allow for failover where if one element fails the other takes over causing little to no downtime. When it comes to the core systems in IT uptime is externally important and at times even mission-critical for business. These redundant systems allow the system administrator to achieve a high level of uptime while also accounting for failures. As more of these core systems move into the cloud the redundancy is still there but might look different or the person whose responsibility it is might be different.

Redundancy in AV

Now that we briefly covered redundancy in IT you might be wondering how does this relates to AV? It's not like our displays are coming with dual power supplies or our microphones coming with dual lines out. That is true but we still have redundancy built-in by having spare equipment on the shelf. Having spare equipment waiting to go reduces downtime of our spaces. Another way that we have redundancy in AV is by providing multiple ways to connect to our systems. Being able to use different devices allows for a class to keep going in the event a device is not working correctly. For example, if we are a BYOD campus and the user forgot their device or their device stops working, then a spare device could be used to get them up and running in the meantime.

Redundancy Lacking

We might have areas in AV that have redundancy but we also have areas that is lacking redundancy. One key element that is missing the support of redundancy is staffing. Each school has its own staffing needs and different size teams but most do not have multiple people who cover the same responsibilities. Now I do not suggest schools carry two or more employees that cover the same responsibilities as that can be a waste of resources. I am suggesting that we should have cross-training among our team members. Having a teammate that can address issues when another is out is a way to get redundancy without wasting resources. Another area where we are missing redundancy is the automatic failover system. An automatic failover system is a system that will automatically switch over to another system if the primary unit fails. In the IT world, this is very common in services like domain controllers. Now, this is an area that might be hard to have redundancy in. We do not want to over-design our builds and we want to keep our costs down. We can still archive a high level of uptime by performing preventive maintenance. Now, this is not an automatic process as it requires boots on the ground to come across problem areas before our end users find them.

Conclusion

We may never have all of our core systems providing redundancy as the IT world does. This does not mean we can not have the need for a high level of uptime. We can archive uptime by making sure we keep spare equipment, cross-training teammates, and performing preventive maintenance. Another thing that is helping us provide redundancy is the movement to software and cloud. Having more software AV and cloud servers will allow us to leverage the redundancy power of IT.