Users assess disaster plans
By
Deni Connor
,
Network World
, 10/31/2005
- Share/Email
- Tweet This
- Print
ORLANDO - Amid the devastation of Hurricane Wilma last week, IT professionals appraised their disaster-recovery and data-protection
plans and said their strategies are in flux, regular testing is necessary and funding is still hard to get.
At the Storage Networking World conference last week - attended by more than 2,000 IT professionals - a panel of users said
that although disaster recovery and data protection head their lists of IT priorities, funding is often elusive, and many
of their strategies are in transition as their storage and application infrastructure changes.
Funding a disaster-recovery scheme is difficult, said Hal Weiss, systems engineer for Baptist Memorial Health Care in Memphis.
"One of the major issues of a hospital organization is that we are constrained by the amount of money we get because we depend
on Medicare and Medicaid to reimburse us," he said.
Weiss said his disaster-recovery plan is limited, because he is not involved in determining which applications the organization
purchases.
"I can't pick the applications the organization uses, because they are controlled by the clinicians," Weiss said. "Sometimes
an application doesn't lend itself to a disaster-recovery strategy."
Weiss has a 138T-byte storage-area network (SAN) and is experiencing a 300% annual increase in data that needs to be protected. For backing up the data on his SAN and disaster
recovery, he uses Revivio's CPS 1200 continuous data protection array and Copan's Revolution 200T array.
Money for disaster recovery is often denied because businesses don't understand its necessity.
"Recovery has always been kind of a 'Johnny One Note' business process," said John Toigo, moderator of the panel and senior
analyst for Toigo Partners in Dunedin, Fla. Management "sees it as spending money on a set of procedures that don't yield
any tangible benefits to the company," he said.
John Gideon, business continuity manager for Rent-a-Center in Plano, Texas, has received funding for disaster recovery and
has created an out-of-state hot site for his business-critical and financial applications.
"Our finance systems are replicated in real time [between locations] and will come up in different stages depending on the
application," Gideon said.
At Auto Warehousing in Tacoma, Wash., CIO Dale Frantz also has set in motion a plan to test his disaster preparedness.
"We have 28 facilities and we test at a specific facility once a month," Frantz said. "Our tests involve pulling out drives
in the server to watch the failover process and make sure it works."
Al Todd, senior vice president of IT for Pacific Capital Bancorp in Santa Barbara, Calif., also tests his disaster recovery
plan regularly. While Todd uses a service to protect his data, he plans to bring his disaster recovery onsite in the next
year.
"We take data [annually] from our offsite storage facility and have it flown out to the site, download the data onto a machine
at the site, attach it to the SAN and prove we can run our systems remotely from Philadelphia," Todd said. "We are now in
a transition to several times a year testing and will bring our disaster recovery in-house."
Partner Content
www.bmc.com
Gartner 2009 Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling
Gartner has positioned BMC CONTROL-M in the Leaders Quadrant of their "2009 Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling." The report assesses the ability to execute and completeness of vision of key vendors in the marketplace. Read a full copy today, courtesy of BMC Software.
Download whitepaper
Dell's SMART Approach to Workload Automation
Read a compelling case study by EMA, Inc. to learn how Dell uses BMC CONTROL-M to cut cost and increase productivity with workload automation.
Download whitepaper
Workload Automation Cost Savings 2 Minute Video
A major computer manufacturer uses BMC CONTROL-M and just four people to schedule and run over 85,000 jobs every month. By switching to BMC CONTROL-M, they more than quadrupled the workload without adding a single staff member. See how in this 2-minute video overview.
Go to video
Comment