Yes, absolutely. Please ask the sales team for further details.

Some numbers you might be interested to hear in the meantime though...

• The evolve™ system crrently processes an average of 600 database queries per second (yes that is right... about 5 million per day, 16 billion pe year!)
• We store around 20 million documents and 4 million CVs bewteen all of our customers
• The evolve™ system runs on a total of around 80 IBM Blade servers (all dual CPU, many dual or quad core), all working together as one giant cluster to provide huge processing and data processing capability.

We don't rely on any 3rd parties to provide connectivity to us since FCP is an independent Internet Service Provider in our own right (AS34830).

We are the only software provider in this market who has this capability.

5 Nines (or 99.999%) service availability refers to the amount of uptime you can expect from a service. FCP with evolve™ is the only SaaS provider to the recruitment industry that not only claims telecoms-standard 5-nines availability, but (we put our money where our mouth) - offers very substantial money back guarantees in this regard.

The thing is that we've spent a great deal of money building the evolve™ infrastructure to a level that is able to guarantee this sort of reliability... over 80 servers, clustered NetApp® fibrechannel SANS, Multi-tenant architecture, independent multiple fibre connections, dual datacentres etc etc...

And while any fly-by-night operation can claim to offer 100% availability (and rely on good luck to achieve it as many do).. you'll find the back down pretty quickly when you ask them what compensation terms they offer for downtime you do experience!!

A better question you might ask though is what acual difference does this make to my business? Is 5-nines really better than 2 or 4 for instance?

To get a real idea of what the numbers mean, consider that some of our competitors claim 99% availability – sounds pretty good huh? ..except that when you work it out, 99% actually equates to over 3.5 days downtime per year! That's a lot of lost revenue if it works out as an hour or two every week (maybe on a busy afternoon just as you are re-booking contractors?)....

The other thing is that most everyone else excludes 'scheduled' downtime (this is time they will say is needed for maintenance or repairs).. which means that providing they have notified you (that they are going to be offline for the whole of Monday morning for instance!), then they can exclude this from their availability commitment/ contract SLA...

We think that's rubbish! These systems can (ours does) and should be designed to allow online, realtime, no-downtime maintenance to take place... so when say 99.999% availability and uptime... that is what we mean and what you will get!! If you want to see stats to back this up, just ask!

Absolutely not!

While our multi-tenant architecture allows a shared hardware infrastructure, each client’s data is physically separated between client builds.

Although shared database schemas are the most common way of building online applications (because it's cheaper to build shared systems this way, so many of our competitors do), we believe that this is fundamentally wrong - your data should NEVER share anything except the underlying hardware infrastructure.

That way there is no way that an 'accident' coulld ever mix/release your data to anyone else. Again, when evaluating competitors products, this is something you want to get a clear (written!) answer on..

No problem at all. It’s your data!

While we don’t have any clients who make use of this facility, we understand why emotionally, customers like to feel that this option is available to them.

If that is what you need though , then we can arrange to provide complete or partial data exports to you (posted or couriered on DVD) on a weekly or monthly basis. Please contact the pre-sales team to discuss these options.

We have a multi-layered backup strategy that reflects our platform architecture. This would be quite complex to cover in detail here, but can be summarised as:

1.  All ‘live’ data is replicated in real time. At any time there are no less that two identical copies of all ‘live’ data at our primary datacentre. Note that by replicated, we don’t just mean the use of RAID (see FAQ). This allows us to guarantee continuous data availability with no downtime, even for maintenance of the storage subsystems.

2.  On a daily basis, this data is incrementally backed up to a local nearline storage subsystem.

3.  The data from the nearline storage subsystem is then replicated offsite to our secondary data centre, providing a guarantee that we could remain operational (and most importantly that you data would be backed up safely) even in the event of a catastrophic incident at our primary location.

Very! More importantly, it’s much, much safer that you could probably make it yourselves.

We understand very clearly why putting your data in someone else’s hands is a worry, which is why we have designed our systems and the processes we have to make sure that even in the event of a catastrophic incident (a bomb or plane crash destroys the datacentre for example), your data is recorded to a second independent location.

In addition to multiple redundant systems, physical access to the locations is restricted to a very limited number of authorised persons.

Our datacentres are approved to a standard to allow them to host sensitive govenment data. It goes without saying that their is extensive use of Biometric access controls, 24hr guards and continuous monitoring. Even the datacentre security staff don't have direct access to our equipment suite.

For more on Security and evolve™, see our full article.