Eye of the hurricane: New Orleans prepares

If a Katrina-strength storm were to hit New Orleans tomorrow, again wiping out the entire traditional telecom infrastructure, CIO Greg Meffert says the city would be able to respond quickly, thanks to innovative disaster-recovery plans based on Wi-Fi and VoIP.

Four city-owned SUVs outfitted with Unisys Mobile Communications Hubs that include wireless gear and satellite dishes mounted on the roof would hit the streets as soon as the roads became passable. The SUVs, equipped with solar-powered batteries, would act as mobile network operations centers (NOC) designed to keep city officials connected to each other and the outside world over 756Kbps very small aperture terminal uplinks. “It’s a NOC that can create a small Wi-Fi cloud around it for phones and laptops,” Meffert says.

Residents with Wi-Fi-enabled laptops or VoIP phones would be able to access the Internet for free over EarthLink’s 15-square-mile downtown wireless mesh network, a stipulation in the company’s contract with the city that Meffert insisted upon. “We needed it to be free, a baseline free service. We need it to be there during a storm,” he says.

The recovery plan also calls for a backup data center 450 miles away — well inland — in Austin, Texas. Through an arrangement with the city of Austin, key New Orleans servers will occupy a rack in Austin’s data center. That standby recovery center will take over as soon as weather forecasters place New Orleans in the “cone” of future hurricanes, the area a storm is most likely to hit. “When we’re in the cone, we’re going to roll all our servers to Austin, and we’ll do that every storm,” Meffert says.

Because the plan relies on Internet connectivity, the city has contracts with local ISP Data Sync, plus Cox and Level 3 Communications, and each provider uses a different path to the Internet.

In addition, the municipal Wi-Fi network that covers about 4 square miles downtown, including the French Quarter, Central Business District and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, will connect to a tower on the tallest building in the city, One Shell Square, which will link via an optical point-to-point connection to a Level 3 Internet point of presence in neighboring St. Charles Parish, Meffert says. The city plans to install generators stocked with weeks worth of fuel to keep the municipal Wi-Fi cloud running.

Greg Meffert, New Orleans' CIO:

“If nukeproof telco switches were a way to deal with crises, the Department of Defense would never have built the Internet to begin with.You need something that can take a direct hit. [With VoIP] you could change a DNS server, an e-mail provider, and I don't need to know about it. Your communications still get through.”

Greg Meffert, New Orleans' CIO.

Click to see: Meffert