In the Event of an Actual Emergency...
by Bill Lewis
For the past several years, the University of Cincinnati has been actively planning for Disaster Recovery. A major accomplishment in our DR planning is the agreement that we have with The Ohio State University computing center. OSU and UC share each other's resources, which translates into a significant savings in tax dollars. In the event of a disaster at either location, mainframe applications could be restored at the other university's location within twenty-four hours. In addition, we are placing equipment and data at each other's site to back up critical resources approximately 100 miles from their original location.
UC has spent a significant amount of effort documenting procedures that relate to the safety of the employee. Disaster recovery planners have developed additional documentation relating to recovery of the many computer systems housed on campus. This documentation is also stored (i.e., backed-up) at the OSU location. In the event of a disaster, the very equipment that houses our procedures may not be available. Eventually, we will have written documentation so that Ohio State technicians can perform our recovery for us - in the event our technical staff is unavailable.
UC also has servers with Internet access up in Columbus at OSU. These provide a 'basic infrastructure' of components that may be impossible to rebuild on our campus in the event of a disaster. This equipment assures that UC could resume having a world-wide web presence within hours of a disaster. We have tested this capability on several occasions and actually used it when our data center was shut down for planned maintenance.
Authentication tools, and basic e-mail for approximately 600 employees would be available, within hours, too, in the event of a disaster.
We have completed two disaster recovery tests with the assumption that our data center is unavailable. Each of the tests revealed several issues relating to notification throughout the university, access to the Emergency Operating Center and accessibility to data. As we test our procedures, we rework and refine our documentation.
The cost of additional equipment and the reality that a true disaster is not likely may prohibit us from placing other back-up hardware at OSU. What we must continue to do is document the procedures required to restore our critical systems.
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