Case of the Great Hot-Site Swap 119
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.'"
Higher Ed. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Maine (Score:2, Interesting)
Survival/Preparedness community (Score:3, Interesting)
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:The Great Exchange (Score:1, Interesting)
Notes does a lot of what Exchange does, and does a whole lot more.
Re:Higher Ed. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.