Case of the Great Hot-Site Swap

BobB writes "Two universities — Bowdoin in Maine and Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles — have entered a unique arrangement under which they are backing up each other's web sites, email and servers on different ends of the continent. They say this could be a disaster recovery model all sorts of organizations could follow. From the article: 'When Bowdoin switched over to Exchange e-mail, so the schools would have similar e-mail infrastructure, LMU staffers were their guides and advisers. "We implemented that pretty quickly," says Davis, the Bowdoin CIO. "When we launched Exchange, we had just eight calls to our help desk." And the shared experience of the infrastructure components then forms a kind of informal help desk, where managers and staff can reach out for advice, brainstorm and troubleshoot problems with their colleagues a continent away.'"

The Great Exchange

When we launched Exchange, we had just eight calls to our help desk.

So they had Exchange running their helpdesk phone system too?

Not nearly as exciting as I first read it...

Case of the Great Hot-Wife Swap

Pity. It being a Saturday, I kind of wanted to read that article.

Higher Ed.

From what I understand, this is pretty common in higher ed -- in fact, the college that I work for is currently setting up something similar with another college in the area. Not cross-continent redundancy, true, but enough to keep things going should there be a smaller disaster in the area. If all of Western New York is wiped out, I don't really care if people can get their email.

This really came to the forefront with the beating the New Orleans area colleges took during Katrina; from what I recall, Loyola and Tulane were really unprepared and suffered for it.

--saint

Re:

I am not familiar with specifics of these agreements, so perhaps you can tell me... is security jointly administered (blanket policies/configs etc), does the host institution have oversight, or does the institute that originates the data have oversight of

Re:Higher Ed.

Good point.

My company has 30 sites and so it was easy for us to install (Linux) servers at multiple locations and arrange overnight rsync backups of data, server-located 'My Documents' folders, email & Intranet redundancy etc. for business continuity. I am a school governor for my son's local primary school and their backup procedure comprised a disk-to-disk copy from their main student server to another Windows-based server on the network, with an occasional dump to a removable hard disk.

When the school decided to improve their backup (after a disk failure and realisation that their backup process had not been working for a while, naturally!), they approached their incumbent IT supplier for a recommendation - which turned out to be a new main server with Windows 2003 Server, enough CALs for the children, a dual Xeon processors, SCSI-based RAID 5 and removable tape - very functional, very corporate and very expensive (approx £6,500) for a school that teaches 5-11 year olds!

Having approached me for my comments, we are now looking at a two-way peering arrangement with the local secondary school comprising two Linux-based servers with SATA RAID 1 (the school is only using the server for low-volume file and print services so Samba and CUPS are just what's needed), and an overnight backup strategy through the education WAN. Total cost is approx £750 for the two servers.

The only thing that may not make this fly will be County Hall red tape.

VPN connection over a 30Mbps link.

I run backups for a large web hosting company; this is to say I do this 40 hours a week for thousands of servers around the globe.

We have many clients that mirror backups between East and West coast. They may be connected at each end at that speed, but they are almost assuredly not achieving throughput at that rate.

YMMV, but there are 3000 miles to deal with here. I've never been able to achieve speeds like that, and we have some seriously fat pipes in our data centers.

Re:VPN connection over a 30Mbps link.

Remember, these are universities, so they get access to the Internet2 pipes.

Re:

Remember, these are universities, so they get access to the Internet2 pipes.

It doesn't matter how fat the pipes are, the speed-of-light will still bite you in the ass when you are replicating data from one coast to the other.

rsync it, with compression.

That way you only take a real hit during the first copy.

After that, you should be able to copy just the changes and the new files. It is amazing.

Re:

The speed of light is more of a limiting factor for latency, and not throughput.

That said, it's not even a big deal for latency -- light travels at 186,282 miles/second. New York to LA is approximately 2,800 miles.

Most of the latency/bandwidth lag comes f

One of the main problem is...

...that you might have to accept the legal responsibilies of the site that is being backed up. It's not just a simple exchange of providing corresponding services... Take it down to a personal level... who would you trust to use your personal computer as a backup server (in a reciprocal manner)? No one that hasn't your full and complete trust is my guess. Encryption would provide some protection but this isn't about data backup but service fallback.

So unless you have some kind of legal agreement covering your actual risks it's not for everyone. But for large scale organisations, with real legal clout, like universities it might makes sense. But not for individuals.

Re:

Everything you send offsite should be encrypted, and anyone accessing your computer should be jailed somehow.

The problem is, a lot of the people trying to access your computer nowadays want to put you in jail somehow.

Maine

It's always nice to see something from Maine featured in technology news. We're a tiny state population-wise, but there are many high-tech companies here. Hell, even in my own town there is a company that developed and makes the MK47 Advanced Lightweight

on a less formal/intense level: higher ed dns

The alternate nameservers for many Universities are often at other schools. Not the same thing, but interesting to note:


mtnBook:~ $ whois rochester.edu
Name Servers:
      NS1.UTD.ROCHESTER.EDU 128.151.2.1
      NS2.UTD.ROCHESTER.EDU 128.151.7.6
      SIMON.CS.CORNELL.EDU
      DNS.CS.WISC.EDU

mtnBook:~ $ whois cornell.edu
Name Servers:
      BIGRED.CIT.CORNELL.EDU 128.253.180.2
      DNS.CIT.CORNELL.EDU 192.35.82.50
      CAYUGA.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU

mtnBook:~ $ whois ucsb.edu
Name Servers:
      NS1.UCSB.EDU 128.111.1.1
      NS2.UCSB.EDU 128.111.1.2
      KNOT.BROWN.EDU



There's a bunch more NYU/UCBerkeley, WUSTL/ULA, etc.

My mail is backed up in at least 5 centres

CIA, FBI, CSIS, KGB, MI5...

It is the most secure backup system in the world.

Re:My mail is backed up in at least 5 centres

...says yet another that's never tried a restore.

Survival/Preparedness community

This is common for survivalist and preparedness minded folks. You and a trusted relative or friend exchange backup critical gear/necessities/copies of records, etc. In case of catastrophic loss of either abode, the other person has a decent "backup" for you to fall back on. Arrangements like this have been quite common for some decades now, usually they include mutually assured lodging, should full long term evacuation be required. IMO, it is quite a sound idea. Remember on the news, you see the same scene all the time, those scenes from..take your pick, fires, floods, hurricanes or whatever.. the newsies always zero in on those folks who are all freaked out and sad, and EVERY time they say "We lost EVERYTHING!"..well, there's no need for that if you take the time in advance to preposition enough of your gear so it doesn't fall into the "everything" category. The situation will still suck, but having a nice set of backup everything will sure help mitigate things and make the situation suck *less*. As to what to exchange/store, use your imagination, what would you like to have as a backup if for some reason your home just got wiped out? Spare sets of clothes for everyone, favorite toys for the kids, some electronic gear, tools, sporting goods, books, other media of importance to you, family photos, household records, personal mementos, etc. Salt to taste there. Even just a stuffed closet is good enough, that and the place to evacuate *to*.

That, and what we call BOBs, or "bug out bags" are good ideas. A "bob" is a backpack or other container (backbacks are good in case you get stuck on foot), that has enough critical essentials to keep you alive for a week or so, enough even on foot to get you out of the disaster area most likely. It's called a bug-out bag from the old army term, and it is designed so if you have zero notice-hear on the radio local railroad has a tanker car full of chlorine leaking, nasty forest fire heading your way, and it's close, etc, that you can grab it and go, out the door within less than one minute. Very high speed emergency evacuation. The deal is, you hope you never need it, but if you do, it literally could save your life.

Interesting subject, and although it is not directly related to the main parent IT topic, the concept is very similar.

Re:

Excluding religious points.. why not? Exchange is nowdays a VERY MATURE colaboration system and the de-facto standard for business in many places. What's the diference? Use Exchange, GMail, POP3 or whatever you want. It's all about freedome, isn't it?

Re:

/late night rant on/Actually there is a large number of individuals who are supportes of the free/os movement for ideological reasons: "it's all about freedom" they cry, "let's us all decide what to use", "information wants to be free", "yadda yadda"... An

Lol...

Who modded this? Aside from the post being more or less irrelevant (it's not about a multi-peered architecture) his comparison to his LAN using his parents system should have been a good reason to rule out ANY enterprise architecture expertise whatsoever.

Re:

As a system admin who has a backup place... I can tell you I might not do it with a competitor, but a major client or reseller, I'd certainly think about it, if they had the expertise...

Of course, if they had the expertise, they'd do it in house... And I'

Re:Lol...

Maybe his parents are Ma Bell and Uncle Sam.

Rumor has it they've been in bed together for years.

Oblig grammer nazi

"lively hood" - is that as opposed to a boring neighborhood?

It's not as bad as it was

Exchange used to be a great steaming pile of rubbish you could not back up properly without shutting down everything for the duration of the tape run (yes there were hacks, but not really good enough for bare metal recovery). It has improved a lot since t

Simple answer

How'd this make the front page?!

Simple - and you answer it with the first sentence of your post:

The summary mentions a university using Exchange successfully.

You're trying to say that this *isn't* front-page news? :)