Networking World: How IT managers prepped their servers for Hurricane Rita

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: DENI CONNOR ON SERVERS
09/29/05
Today's focus: How IT managers prepped their servers for
Hurricane Rita

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* IT managers prepared servers for Rita
* Links related to Servers
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: How IT managers prepped their servers for
Hurricane Rita

By Deni Connor

With Hurricane Rita only a harrowing memory for IT managers in
Texas last week, their mantra for protecting servers, if they
didn't have server replication in place, was largely "back up
their data, take them down, cover them up and get out of the
building."

Hurricane Rita slammed Texas businesses Saturday morning and
caused the evacuation of 1.3 million people from Gulf Coast
cities like Galveston, Corpus Christi and Houston.

Here's what some IT managers did with their servers prior to
Rita's wrath.

Although Todd Coury, network manager for law firm Andrews Kurth
in Houston, didn't answer his phone or return Network World's
calls, we know that his servers are protected by MessageOne's
OneSwitch service. In a previous interview, Coury said he uses
OneSwitch to replicate his Windows applications and data to
Dallas.

"We are replicating data from Houston to a disaster recovery
[storage-area network] in Dallas, so if Houston goes offline, we
can continue to work with the Houston data, even if the network
is unavailable in Houston," Coury said.

"With OneSwitch, I can log in from home or from anywhere and
fail over our key systems to our Dallas office," he said.
"Before, I would have had to go onsite and fail over our
systems." OneSwitch provides automated replication and failover
during a disaster or system failure.

Other IT managers in Houston reported that they were battening
down their businesses for Rita's approach.

James Taylor, IT manager for SPX Valves and Controls in Houston,
spent last Wednesday and Thursday preparing for Rita. "We're
doing backups on the server and we push data up to our
Charlotte, N.C., location just in case the server gets buried."

Taylor thought about moving his servers out of the facility, but
decided against it.

"Right now trying to get out of Houston is impossible - you
really risk getting into a wreck, and the servers are safer
here," Taylor says. "We are going to tie them down, move the low
servers to the top of the rack, unplug everything and then cover
them up."

Greg Arnold, CIO for Big Dog Logistics in Houston, chose
LiveVault's InSync vaulting service to protect his servers.

"Starting this evening, we are going to being transferring all
our data to some servers in Atlanta," Arnold says.

"We put in LiveVault for lots of reasons, Hurricane Allison
being one of them," Arnold says. "Keeping tapes and transferring
them around, they get lost and damaged. The Internet being what
it is we can transfer data to another location and resume
operations from around the world."

Arnold has set up a business center in North Houston where some
key individuals will work out of a home.

Networking World

Thursday, September 29, 2005

How IT managers prepped their servers for Hurricane Rita

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