Mistral IT Supports YP Solutions
Have you seen the first storm of the season? Not tropical depression Alberto, but the flood of ads from companies leveraging hurricane hysteria to sell various data protection services. In contrast to the torrent of pushy ads in poor taste, this is the story of a small company in New Orleans, servers in Dallas, and how YP Solutions managed to keep working in spite of Hurricane Katrina.
Technically in Metairie, Louisiana, the 30 employees of YP (Yellow Pages) Solutions (now part of Local Matters, Inc., www.localmatters.com) worked just across the 17th Street Canal from New Orleans proper. Providing Internet Yellow Pages, directory assistance, and local search market content, YP Solutions provides products that are completely computerized and in many cases virtual, such as local directory databases for directory assistance operators.
Computers aren’t just helpful at YP Solutions, computers hold the entire company’s value on their hard disks. No computers, no business.
Enter Hurricane Katrina. Employees were told to evacuate before Katrina devastated New Orleans on Monday, August 29th. On Tuesday, August 30th, YP Solutions employees continued with their work, even though they were scattered from Connecticut to Utah. While FEMA fumbled and the levees broke, YP Solutions continued business as usual.
Offsite production environment hosting
Mistral IT (.com) offers remote data backup services under the name Global Data Vault (they bought GDV in March of 2006). They also offer application hosting, the service used by YP Solutions.
YP Solutions applications ran on servers in the Dallas InfoMart, inside a secure data center. Mistral IT owns the equipment and supports YP Solutions and other companies from the Dallas data center.
Running applications remotely requires high network bandwidth between the company and the data center. When the employees scattered ahead of Hurricane Katrina, residential bandwidth providers linked them to their servers. While a company needs many mega bits of bandwidth to support 30 concurrent computer users, a single user retains acceptable performance across a residential DSL or cable Internet provider connection.
Once employees connected to the applications running in Dallas from their post-Katrina evacuation locations, they worked exactly as they do every other day. This productivity in the face of a natural disaster explains the federal government’s push to support telework for many federal employees. Have computer and bandwidth, and thanks to application hosts like Mistral IT you have your regular work experience.
Remote data backup
Every backup plan needs to include three features: be automatic, be reliable, and be offsite. Global dataVault (Mistral IT) provides all these features, as do many online backup services.
While YP Solutions uses customized applications, many companies rely heavily on standard office documents such as text files and spreadsheets. Client and/or server-based backup applications automatically compress, encrypt, and transmit changed files to the Global dataVault backup storage disks in the Dallas data center. Only changes to the files are backed up (after the first complete backup), greatly reducing the backup transmission times.
Beyond the value to the company of protecting data files, remote data backups solve problems for travelers with laptops and home users as well. Laptop computers use the same backup application as the desktop system, but can save and retrieve files from any location. If laptops work while not connected to the Internet, such as during a plane trip (and the laptop is used for more than a movie player or Solitaire) the files will synchronize at the next network connection opportunity.
Replacing your application software (at least the off-the-shelf variety) after a disaster is straightforward and relatively quick. Replacing your data without a current backup will take years and will result in lost time and money on a major scale. Most businesses that suffer catastrophic data loss, whether through disaster or poor computer management, go out of business. Plan ahead, and stay in business.
