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Planning for Disaster – Houston-style: Part 2

Early Sunday morning, specialty chemical company Champion Technologies failed back their data center to their Houston headquarters.

Originally disabled by power being down in their headquarters building, Champion had to execute a disaster recovery drill and fail over their data center operations to a site in Scottsdale, Ariz. That failover occurred Friday evening. All operations, which started at 6:00 PM, were completed at 11:00 PM that night –five hours later.

When the power went back on Saturday night about 9:00 PM, Champion’s IT staff and FalconStor Software staff re-convened at the Houston offices, ready to fail back data center operations to Houston in time for the workweek on Monday.

After some preparation, failback started. The UPS, Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch, MPLS router, Dot Hill storage and Cisco Fibre Channel switches were powered on, according to a carefully-orchestrated plan, documented in Microsoft Project.

FalconStor Network Storage Server appliances, which handle the replication of data from Houston to Scottsdale and vice versa, were powered on to start the replication process back to Houston. Data base synchronization from Scottsdale to Houston was finished 6 hrs later. At 11:00 am Champion staff validated the replication, then proceeded to assign SAN resources to the servers, SAP was brought up and VMware servers were powered on and validated. Microsoft Exchange message stores were mounted. I missed all those operations, blissfully sleeping in a hotel bed two blocks away.

When I arrived at Champion’s Houston office at 11:30 Sunday morning, failback was again in full progress. Left to do was to replicate the deltas back to Houston. Because only a small amount of changes had taken place to the data, this operation took place quickly and without any problems.

After operations had resumed in Houston, users were locked out of the system in Scottsdale, the Scottsdale servers were shut down, SAP was downed and the Exchange message stores were unmounted from the Scottsdale servers.

Everything was ‘All systems go,’ as they say in Texas by 2:30 PM Sunday. Most of us – Stanley Qin, vice president of professional services, excluded – were home in time for dinner. Stanley was on a plane back to FalconStor Software in New York.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 6:55 am and is filed under IT's Sto-Relevant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. // Both Comments and Pings are open ?> You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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