The week after Labor Day means the return of the nation's
approximately 18 million college students to campuses; meanwhile,
headline-making disasters like 2005's hurricane season have also
highlighted the need for more sophisticated disaster recovery (DR)
plans for even the smallest and newest of higher-ed institutions.
But, without the kind of funding the largest enterprises have at
their disposal, colleges and universities have had to reach out to
one another for better DR.
On the front lines of the disaster that changed the nation's
thinking on disaster recovery is the University of New Orleans IT
department, under assistant vice chancellor for university
computing and communications Jim Burgard.
The University didn't have a flood in its computer room, but had to
abandon it from late August to October with temperatures inside
approaching 100 degrees. The Chancellor himself had to board a boat
to get some backup tapes, since the campus' offsite vault was in a
flooded area of New Orleans. That, Burgard said, is when the
University of New Orleans, like many along the Gulf Coast, learned
the value of distance in DR.
In preparing for this semester, Burgard said, the University is
working to widen the geographical range of its DR plan. The first
step was to switch out tape-vaulting vendors; Burgard declined to
name the local vendor whose facility flooded, but said they now
send tapes offsite with Iron Mountain, which can guarantee to have
his tapes back to him anywhere, overnight. If a storm approaches
their facility in Louisiana, Burgard said, they can shift the tapes
to Nashville, Tenn.
Meanwhile, according to Burgard, the University is also making a
move away from tape altogether. It has officially joined the
Louisiana Optical Networking Initiative, which formed to help
public institutions in the state join the National LambdaRail, a 40
gigabyte link operated by a national consortium of research
organisations, from hospitals to universities.
"In the future, we can plan to put a storage device at other
Universities in Shreveport and Baton Rouge," Burgard said. The
University, which has had to negotiate continued infrastructure
problems in the area, including power outages, is storing its
mission-critical data on the Louisiana State University (LSU)
campus in Baton Rouge until Burgard and his crew can get a
generator up and running to back up power to their New Orleans data
centre.
"I didn't realise [before Katrina] how hard it could be to get
ahold of my backup tapes," Burgard said. LSU is also working to get
its paper documents online, Burgard said.
Not only are other colleges and universities catching on to the
lessons on wide-area DR that the University of New Orleans learned
firsthand, but they're also taking a similar cooperative approach
to stretching their budgets. Olin College of Engineering in
Needham, Mass., which just graduated its first class of business
students last year, has a similar collaboration with neighboring
Babson College, according to Olin's CIO Joanne Kossuth.
Babson College is located in Wellesley, Mass., about five miles
away from Olin's campus in Needham. The two schools have gone in
together on a direct fiber connection between their two data
centres, and the schools will be putting EqualLogic's PS Series
arrays into one another's data centres and replicating data (a free
feature with EqualLogic's product) over the fiber connection.
It's not the kind of wide-area DR network that Hurricane Katrina
showed would be the most ideal. But, said Kossuth, "There are so
many choices out there—so many new technologies for us to stay on
top of. It becomes a matter of what we can afford."
Sharing resources
Some large schools, like the University of Minnesota (UMN),
ranked among the top 30 schools in the country with an endowment of
more than $1.3 billion, have the means to do their own offsite DR.
But, sharing resources for DR has also taken place on UMN's campus,
according to manager of data management services Carl Follstad.
Coming into this semester, Follstad said, the overarching goal
of the University is to centralise operations among its dozens of
departments -- part of which is moving departmental file servers
into one big, centralised system of four 1 terabyte Dell 2850 file
servers running Windows 2003 in the University's data centre, for
which Follstad's department provides backup and DR.
According to Follstad, the University is using a feature in
VMware to create a "stretch cluster" that will fail over to another
set of identical file servers 3 kilometres away in one of the
University's sub-campuses across the Mississippi River from the
main data centre. The data from the central file servers is being
mirrored to the other servers using Veritas Volume Manager.
"Most departments don't have the resources to do something like
this," Follstad said.
Colleges and universities are also changing their priorities
when it comes to defining mission-critical data. According to Jerry
Waldron, CIO of Salisbury University, Katrina demonstrated for him
that communications infrastructure has become more important than
some applications he had prioritised for replication to the campus
of Coppin State College in Baltimore.
"Two years ago, if you'd asked me what was critical, I'd have
told you our learning management and WinCT applications," he said.
"But we can deal with not being able to produce a transcript for a
week -- broadcasting about what's going on to students and parents
needs to happen right away."