Data center nearly restored for New Orleans schools

It has been near 28 months since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Peggy Abadie, executive director of IT and head of the nine-member IT team in the New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) are still living through the disaster recovery, although progress is being made.

In September, the school district's data center was able to begin the move back to its original location in the administration building in the Orleans Parish on the West Bank. On Friday, the final migration of all servers and networking applications into the data center will occur, Abadie said.

"We are moving forward," Abadie said in a recent interview.

The data center was on the fourth floor of the administration building when the storm hit Aug. 29, 2005. The hurricane blew the air conditioning system off the roof and rain leaked in. When power was restored to the data center, there was no air conditioning and the rainwater and steamy 118-degree heat corroded contacts on switches and other gear. Repairs to the data center cost more than $3 million.

The district had 128 schools when the storm hit, and now has only 52 schools open where students attend classes, she said.

Abadie's knowledge of the school district's IT network began well before the storm. She was a solutions architect working at Bell South, assigned to help implement a $52 million network upgrade for the schools.

The upgrade included a fiber-optic backbone from Cox Communications Inc. and used hundreds of network routers and switches from Cisco. By the time the storm struck, about $43 million of the $52 million had been spent, and the flood set back the project by about $10 million, Abadie said.

The flooding brought 15 feet of water to about 80% of the city, meaning copper cabling was lost on ground floors of schools. When air conditioning systems were knocked out, including the one serving the data center, some switches and other gear overheated and failed.

But Abadie said there was some amazing resiliency in the network as well. The fiber-optic cabling didn't fail, and only needed to be drained and dried out to work. About 70% of the network gear was restored to use.

In all, about $4 million in copper cabling had to be replaced, and the school district has installed Category 6 cable, upgrading from Category 5e that was lost, Abadie said.

Part of the reason costs were not higher is because the network being built was resilient, but also because the IT team was so dedicated and professional, Abadie said. IT workers climbed through buildings in 118-degree heat after the storm and documented all the destruction to make the recommendations for a quick recovery.

"What an incredible story this IT team has because they are dedicated and competent, hanging in there while five superintendents were replaced since the storm," she said. "Through it all we had a documented plan, working with vendors steadily. We had a clear plan, with documents and photos of everything, as well as soft copies."

Clarity in the documentation was especially important because most of the district schools were taken over by the state after the storm, so that Abadie's group was supporting networks for both state and local officials. "The politics we faced were very difficult and still are very difficult," she said. "But we had clear documentation of what had been done and were able to say this was what we were doing and why. The clarity of our staff was refreshing."

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