Law firm retools its backup scenario

The New Orleans law firm of Chaffe McCall found two major flaws with its disaster-recovery plan. First, the firm had another office in Baton Rouge where employees could go to work, and it had backup tapes that contained its data, but that office had no tape drive to restore tapes from, says James Zeller, senior network manager for the firm.

Second, the firm had consolidated its Internet traffic so the Baton Rouge office connected via the firm's T-1 WAN to the New Orleans office, and then to the Internet via the New Orleans office's dual Internet T-1s. With all the New Orleans network services down, the firm had no Internet access. The New Orleans office housed the only e-mail server the firm had.

Today, the firm has T-1 Internet access for the Baton Rouge office to supplement the connections in New Orleans. That way a hurricane that cuts off the New Orleans office will not affect Internet access for workers in the Baton Rouge office. This is important, because after Katrina, the Baton Rouge office was temporarily expanded to accommodate about 40 extra employees who needed the Internet and e-mail to do business. The firm also set up offices in Lafayette, La., and Houston from which workers had access to applications and data via Citrix software on company-issued laptops.

To address data restoration, the company has bought Xosoft replication software that can fail one site over to the other as necessary in a disaster. While primary copies of files may reside in either Baton Rouge or New Orleans still, they are constantly being replicated so each site has a complete set of the latest versions of files. Tapes and tape drives are no longer necessary to create the complete data store at either site.

In the event of a storm threatening New Orleans, 12 hours before predicted landfall, the New Orleans office would be shut down and the Baton Rouge office would become the primary site. In the event the storm also hit Baton Rouge, servers there could be shut down entirely until power came back on, but data would be preserved. "We're not concerned about having to shut down entirely for awhile," Zeller says. "The nature of our business doesn't require us to be up 24/7 while the hurricane is blowing over."

During Katrina, no one could get into the firm's New Orleans 1100 Poydras St. office near the Superdome for days. In the meantime, Zeller and his fellow IT staff tried to acquire hardware to run the tape backups, but ran into problems. "The unexpected surprise was the logistics of shipping things. We couldn't get things shipped even to Baton Rouge," he says. That meant the company couldn't set up its data center. "That office wasn't ready to be a disaster-recovery site of that magnitude," he says.