Helping Inmates Stay Connected to Family
Today, ScaleArc shared the news that Telmate, which provides video and phone communications for inmates, relies on ScaleArc to improve uptime and performance for its teleconferencing services.
Research shows how vital it is for prisoners to stay in touch with friends and family while they’re in prison. Dr. James Woodall, who is co-director of the UK’s Centre for Health Promotion Research, has done research for more than a decade on this topic. He has studied and shown the ways in which preserving family connections offers great benefits for prisoners, families, and wider society, including reducing the likelihood of re-offending. Dr. Woodall notes:
The role of the family cannot be underestimated – for most people the family offers a feeling of belonging and provides support, both in practical and emotional ways. More often than not, they are there to offer guidance and provide listening ear when needed.
Prisons, recognizing these benefits, look to technology to supplement in-person visits or enable communications with distant family and friends. Telmate is a top choice, providing a range of telecommunications services for both inmates and prison employees.
The company augmented its open source MySQL deployment with ScaleArc. “We needed to ensure fault tolerance and better throughput on our mission-critical databases,” said Alex Alexander, database architect at Telmate. “We looked at a number of open source options, but ScaleArc proved to be much more robust and had been deployed in a much larger number of production environments.”
ScaleArc’s ability to distribute database traffic across multiple servers means Telmate can scale its database infrastructure without making changes to its applications. Plus, ScaleArc protects the service from disruption during database failover.
ScaleArc is proud it’s able to help keep Telmate’s services up and running fast to serve this vulnerable population.
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