Skip Links

Network World

  • Social Web 
  • Email 
  • Close

Weathering Katrina

Three IT organizations share their storm stories.
By Phil Hochmuth , Network World , 09/19/2005
Newsletter Signup
  • Share/Email
  • Tweet This
  • Comment
  • Print

As Hurricane Katrina swept over New Orleans, Ochsner Hospital stayed open. But it was getting hot inside. With two of three generators down, fans were brought out to cool patients in the 95-plus-degree heat after air conditioning failed. And as temperatures topped 150 degrees inside critical computer and network equipment, Kurt Induni, the hospital's network services manager, had a call to make.

"We decided after we went down to one generator to shut all critical patient care systems down," Induni says. "We didn't want to take more power than we needed. It's kind of odd to say, but we shut down the patient care systems first to protect them for after the storm was over, when we would need them most."

To conserve power for critical patient life support and other medical gear, hospital staff shut down the mainframe that runs the patient record system, and a back-up Cisco Catalyst 6509 backbone switch. Better to have a cool spare Catalyst on hand in case the primary one failed, Induni says, instead of letting both switches fry.

Doctors and nurses moved to the back-up method of paper record-keeping during the brunt of the storm when the mainframe was offline.


Also: Volunteers rebuild Gulf Coast communications with wireless nets
Katrina's IT aftermath
More Wider Net stories


"It was also a gamble strategy to keep the communication lines up," Induni says. "The 504 area code became useless; e-mail became the only reliable source of communications."

Ochsner was able to keep e-mail and Web access, because its T-3 line connecting to a back-up site in Baton Rouge still worked.

"At the peak of the storm, during the 100-mile-an-hour gusts, I walked over to the nurses' unit, and they were keeping track of the storm online and e-mailing people," Induni says. "If we were cut off completely, people would have gotten really nervous and would have been unable to work. It was our only lifeline to the outside world."

Ochsner's IT staff in New Orleans and Baton Rouge still had to scramble to keep e-mail available, even after the storm. A fiber cut in New Orleans after the storm terminated access to the hospital's e-mail servers, located at another facility on the hospital's metropolitan-area network in the city. Teams at the remote site quickly built Novell GroupWise boxes to serve the New Orleans facility via the T-3 link.

  • Share/Email
  • Tweet This
  • Comment
  • Print
Partner Content

Explore the Ultrium Edge

The powerful tape technology can address data security with tape encryption as well as long term data protection.

Find Out More

Disk and Tape Square Off

Discover what disk and tape really cost and which solution provides lower total cost of ownership and optimizes energy use for your organization

Download this White Paper

Don't Fall for the Myths

The Clipper Group explores the truth behind the myths of tape, digging into the misconceptions in the disk vs. tape debate.

Review this information

information examination

An examination of information security issues, methods and securing data with LTO-4 tape drive encryption

Read this analysis

Comment
Login
Forgot your account info?
Add comment
Anonymous comments subject to approval. Register here for member benefits.
Have a NetworkWorld account? Log in here. Register now for a free account.

Videos

rssRss Feed