“The information technologies’ help desk is currently closed due to weather conditions caused by Hurricane Rita, and the University of Houston Downtown has decided to close the university.”
That’s the message callers heard late last week when they called Hossein Shahrokhi, executive director of IT at the school. That is, if they even were able to get their calls through to Houston, as the fourth-largest city in the U.S. prepared to lock down for Rita’s Category 4 strike.
Shahrokhi is one of 1.3 million residents in Texas who the mayors of Galveston, Corpus Christi and Houston ordered to evacuate last Wednesday morning. With Hurricane Katrina so fresh in mind, these cities aren’t taking chances.
Other IT managers in Houston reached by cell phone reported that even if they did want to go to work, it would be next to impossible.
“I’m probably going to stay in Houston, because I didn’t get any gas and there’s no gas available,” says James Taylor, IT manager for SPX Valves and Controls.
He spent last Wednesday and Thursday preparing for Rita.
“We’re in the middle of getting everything tightened down,” Taylor says. SPX is located just 7 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico.
“The company itself is shutting down [Friday]. We’re doing backups on the server and we push data up to our Charlotte, N.C., location just in case the server gets buried,” he says.
SPX doesn’t have a hot back-up site, so its staff has been doing tape backups and saving user data to a disk that will be carried offsite. The company’s business operations rely primarily on ERP software from J.D. Edwards, which runs on systems in North Carolina and Kansas City, Kan.
“So if everything disappears from here today, people can still do transactions through J.D. Edwards, because all we need is a network line,” he says.
Taylor says of all his systems at SPX, his phone systems are most at risk.
“We have an older system with battery backups, but we don’t have a hot backup for that either,” Taylor says. “We’ve established 800 lines to our Wisconsin site for customers and employees.”
He thought about moving his servers out of the facility but decided against it.
“Right now trying to get out of Houston is impossible – you really risk getting into a wreck and the servers are safer here,” Taylor says. “We are going to tie them down, move the low servers to the top of the rack, unplug everything and then cover them up.”
Hindsight gained from Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 and a desire to be disaster prepared prompted Greg Arnold, CIO for Big Dog Logistics in Houston, to take another look at his disaster-recovery systems. When Allison caused floodwaters to lap around Big Dog’s building, Arnold was backing up to tape.
Now, using LiveVault’s service, which shuttles data and applications over IP to disparate locations, Arnold says he is prepared as well as he can be for Rita’s wrath.
“Starting this evening [last Wednesday], we are going to begin transferring all our data to some servers in Atlanta,” he says.
“Keeping tapes and transferring them around, they get lost and damaged,” Arnold says. “The Internet being what it is we can transfer data to another location and resume operations from around the world.”
Arnold has set up a business center in North Houston where some key individuals will work out of a home.
“For Internet access, we are going to do the best we can,” Arnold says. “For phone systems we’re transferring our phones to a phone bank in the North Houston office.”
Analysts say that if IT hasn’t learned or prepared for Rita yet, it is almost a lost cause.
“If Hurricane Katrina is any indication, the biggest issue is going to be communications – communication systems were basically out of commission,” says Stephanie Balaouras, senior analyst for The Yankee Group.
You could be backing up your data regularly, but if you can’t communicate with one another and you don’t have disaster recovery procedures that you regularly maintained and practiced, having regular backups probably isn’t going to help much.”
Todd Coury, network manager for law firm Andrews Kurth LLP in Houston, couldn’t be reached last week, but he did recently discuss his outfit’s IT protection strategy with Network World.
He will use MessageOne’s OneSwitch technology to replicate his Windows applications and data to Dallas, a city that meteorologists say is sufficiently inland to avoid Rita’s punch.
“With OneSwitch, I can log in from home or from anywhere and fail over our key systems to our Dallas office,” Coury says. “Before, I would have had to go onsite and fail over our systems.”
