Municipal Credit Union is one of many organizations that has found it much easier to justify implementing an improved business-continuity program in the past year.
"We didn't have any trouble getting money after Sept. 11," says Barry Grant, CTO for the $918 million outfit, which provides financial services to 300,000 of New York's firemen, police officers and healthcare workers.
Before Sept. 11, Municipal Credit Union relied on tapes to protect its business; Grant had planned to deploy a snapshot back-up system to take images of the system at scheduled times. But in the wake of the attacks, his plans changed dramatically.
"We were addressing what we thought were flaws in the plan before Sept. 11," Grant says. "The thought was that if it took a couple of days to recover, it wasn't that critical a situation - we could work offline."
After being forced out of its building, the credit union worked offline. Grant recovered the back-up tapes from the dust and debris that littered the company's headquarters, located across the street from Ground Zero. The company logged transactions on paper until Grant brought the company's network back online a week later.
Since then, Grant has connected two SAN Valley SL1000 IP-SAN bridges to Municipal Credit Union's HP StorageWorks EMA 12000 storage arrays, which replicate data in real time between storage-area networks in New York and New Jersey.
"Business continuity is now an integral part of our operations," Grant says. "When we are asked about bringing up new applications, part of it is: How do we recover from a failure?"
- Deni Connor
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