The case of the great hot-site swap

A Maine college and a California university are reaching across the continent to share hardware and software in a joint disaster-recovery effort that could be a model not just for other schools but also for other businesses.

You can think of it as the lobster and sushi project.

Besides creating recovery sites at each other’s campus, the networking staff at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, and Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles, also are creating a set of practices that can guide other cooperative IT ventures between different organizations.

Click to see: Bi-coastal disaster recovery chart

Two identical recovery sites, based on blade servers and VMware’s virtual server software, are being assembled on each campus, linked to the Internet with a secure VPN connection over a 30Mbps link. Each campus will host and manage hardware and software bought by the other institution. If a disaster or outage hits either school, the hosting campus will initialize the other’s hot site and run it for the duration of the emergency. IT staff on the stricken campus will access what is in effect their own logical data center, one that’s located on the other side of the United States.

A recent study found almost 30% of business are completely unprepared for disasters or emergencies that could cripple them.

The first step has been to run each other’s emergency Web site, Exchange e-mail and DNS servers. This summer and fall, both schools plan to roll out other virtual servers (see graphic). These new servers will support replication of Microsoft Active Directory, programs such as NTI Group’s Connect-ED, which can record an emergency voice message and distribute it via e-mail, cell phone, paging, instant messaging and other media, and enterprise applications such as learning management systems, payroll, and student information systems.

“This is a dandy example of how to do things properly,” says Michael Karp, senior analyst for Enterprise Management Associates, a technology research company based In Boulder, Colo. Karp covers storage issues, and has been advocating the idea of cooperative disaster recovery, especially for small businesses. “The IT issues are the same for both institutions, around privacy, data availability, records management and all those nitty-gritty details. And it will cost LMU about the same amount to supervise as it will cost Bowdoin, because they have the same infrastructure.”

Keeping costs low

So far, the initial work has been fairly inexpensive, according to numbers compiled by the schools, about $35,000 from June 2006 to June 2007 for each institution, mainly in staff time of about 15 to 20 hours per month. That includes a couple of cross-country plane trips for selected IT staffers from both schools. The schools are projecting about $54,000 more, for each institution, in spending for blade servers, a terabyte of network storage, software licenses, new applications, labor and other expenses.

That compares with an estimated $100,000 per month, or $1.2 million per year, for a commercially hosted disaster-recovery hot site, according to figures from the two schools. That adds up to a return on investment of over $1.1 million yearly.