Disaster recovery lessons

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP ON STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE
09/13/05
Today's focus: Disaster recovery lessons

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Katrina leads us to think about our disaster recovery plans
* Links related to Storage in the Enterprise
* Featured reader resource
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This newsletter is sponsored by Ciena
Protect your mission critical data. Achieve regulatory
compliance. Ensure high availability.

Download Ciena's solution brief that discusses MAN/WAN solutions
that are EMC qualified for distance replication to help you meet
your business continuance and disaster recovery goals. Learn how
to reduce networking costs and meet the strict performance
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http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=114515
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How many devices will be connected to home networks by the year
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_______________________________________________________________

Today's focus: Disaster recovery lessons

By Mike Karp

In this newsletter last July, I wrote a series of articles on
disaster planning, during the course of which many of your
colleagues pitched in to share some very good and simple rules
to follow when it was time for your own disaster planning
exercise.

Here are the links to those articles: What's your simple rule
for disaster recovery planning?
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage3203> - Readers share
their simple rules for disaster recovery
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage6796> - More rules for
disaster recovery <http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage6797>.

Hurricane Katrina's devastation has hit the states of Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama hard, and disaster relief efforts are at
last underway. We all wish the best for our colleagues and their
families in the affected areas.

The pictures from the hurricane brought to mind a story my wife
once told. She used to do customer support for a large database
company, and once when she was pulling the late shift got the
following call at 2 a.m.: "How deep does the water have to be in
the computer room before we push the red button?" I'd like to
think this is one of those urban legends that are rife in the
computer world, or at least that it's one of those apocryphal
tales made up by mainframe database weenies to mess with the
rest of us. But I'm not quite sure.

I know of a major corporate IT room in a Midwestern city whose
"remote" site is literally two city blocks away from the
company's primary location. The good news for them is that they
probably have minimal exposure to hurricanes there.

The less-than-good news is that their entire IT operation and
much of their company's shareholder value might evaporate should
a propane truck and an inexperienced teenage driver in a street
rod happen to intersect violently at some point halfway between
the two.

As you look at the news this evening, imagine what you would do
if you were in charge of disaster preparedness for a site in the
area affected by Katrina. Would you have done well by your
company, or would your business, like your IT center, now be
completely under water?

John, my oftentimes correspondent from Illinois, sent me a note
last week. Now over the course of our correspondence, I have
come to understand that John is not one to mince words. So I
have pruned his e-mail of some of the comparisons he made
between the speed of the official response to the disaster and
the need for IT senior management to provide for a quick way to
get corporate IT sites back online in situations such as this.

John does make a very important point in his note to me that I'd
like to share, however:

"Katrina, especially in the early days, taught all of us one
other major lesson that I thought we all already knew: you need
command/control/communications. Someone has to be in charge."

If you already knew that, and if your team already has a list of
disaster instructions, including a hierarchy of whom to call
when things hit the fan, then good. If not, this is a really
good time for some self-examination. Ask your team if they all
know whom to call in the event of an emergency.

And now ask yourself how long can your company's IT operations
remain offline? For some unfortunate companies in the New
Orleans area, by the time you read this it may be two weeks and
counting.

The top 5: Today's most-read stories

1. McAfee, Tech Assist top anti-spyware test
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstoragealert6931>

2. What's the best way to protect against spyware?
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstoragealert6932>

3. Google hacking
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage6693nlstoragealert6886>

4. Supermarket chain freezes Internet access
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage6649nlstoragealert6887>

5. Cisco warns of another IOS bug
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage6798nlstoragealert6888>

_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Mike Karp

Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the
methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace. He
has spent more than 20 years in storage, systems management and
telecommunications. Mike can be reached via e-mail
<mailto:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Ciena
Protect your mission critical data. Achieve regulatory
compliance. Ensure high availability.

Download Ciena's solution brief that discusses MAN/WAN solutions
that are EMC qualified for distance replication to help you meet
your business continuance and disaster recovery goals. Learn how
to reduce networking costs and meet the strict performance
requirements of these time-sensitive applications.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=114514
_______________________________________________________________
ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the Storage newsletter:
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/index.html

Breaking storage news and analysis:
http://www.networkworld.com/topics/storage.html
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE

GARTNER'S SECURITY HYPE-O-METER

What is hype and has it influenced your network security
efforts? At a recent Gartner security summit, analysts described
what they say are "The Five Most Overhyped Security Threats,"
risks that have been overblown and shouldn't be scaring everyone
as much as they seem to be. For more, click here:

<http://www.networkworld.com/weblogs/security/009180.html>
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