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.'"

Re:Two stories in one...

[El Lobo]

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?

VPN connection over a 30Mbps link.

[More_Cowbell]

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:Higher Ed.

[ushering05401]

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 the remote servers.

Not that it makes a huge difference... my sister had all of her data stolen (and consequently her credit was hijacked) through infiltration of a Bay Area college by ID thieves. No off-siting involved.

Regards.

One of the main problem is...

[KokorHekkus]

...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.

Lol...

[msimm]

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.

That said, as a system admin who's business does not have any kind of secondary solution (no hot/hot, no hot/cold, etc) I'd still be leery of trusting my data or my lively hood to a peer and an admin team I didn't know. Maybe this works better in academia, but I don't see banks or mortgage companies dropping their secondary sites and teaming with competitors to provide this service.

Re:Two stories in one...

[El Lobo]

/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"... And then, when somebody chose to use Exchange or Vista or whatever they are the first to jump and cry foul....Wasn't it about freedom after all? Well, they made their choise, so what's the freaking problem then? It's actualy very amusing. Bytes ate bytes. Software is software and a tool is just a tool and everything that is above childish ideological reasons... Let's people use whatever they want, and believe me, the world will be a less hateful place. /late night rant off/

rsync it, with compression.

[khasim]

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.

Not for everyone...

[fuffer]

"They say this could be a disaster recovery model all sorts of organizations could follow."
For private businesses maybe, but I'm sure hosting backups on other organizations hardware is not acceptable under SOX.

Re:VPN connection over a 30Mbps link.

[moosesocks]

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 from routing or congestion along the tubes.

Re:The Great Exchange

[Kamokazi]

As much as it's fun to knock Microsoft products, there's really not anything that compares to Exchange.

And?

[yellowalienbaby]

Im not sure what special about this? replace University with DataCentre and this happens all the time. With SAN's and dark fibre, you can get machine A at datacentre A writing data directly to tapes in an automated library in DataCentre B, and vice versa. and they generally backup a hell of a lot more than email and websites.

Re:Higher Ed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Recover file xxxxxx.yyy that I accidently deleted three weeks ago please.