Case of the Great Hot-Site Swap

BobB writes "Two universities — Bowdoin in Maine and Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles — have entered a unique arrangement under which they are backing up each other's web sites, email and servers on different ends of the continent. They say this could be a disaster recovery model all sorts of organizations could follow. From the article: 'When Bowdoin switched over to Exchange e-mail, so the schools would have similar e-mail infrastructure, LMU staffers were their guides and advisers. "We implemented that pretty quickly," says Davis, the Bowdoin CIO. "When we launched Exchange, we had just eight calls to our help desk." And the shared experience of the infrastructure components then forms a kind of informal help desk, where managers and staff can reach out for advice, brainstorm and troubleshoot problems with their colleagues a continent away.'"

Comments

How about just collocation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, this is hardly unique. The university's IT department I work for has a similar arrangement with three other universities in place. We offer collocation space for each other and in one case even make each other's IP address space available on both sides. Is something really bad happens our colleagues can bring up our web site at their location and vice versa. In addition to that we also use SunGuard so that the administration is able to keep on running even if our campus falls off the world.

I guess we should have submitted an article to trade magazines to give us more publicity also.

Re:VPN connection over a 30Mbps link.

[quanticle]

Remember, these are universities, so they get access to the Internet2 pipes.

on a less formal/intense level: higher ed dns

[Ex Machina]

The alternate nameservers for many Universities are often at other schools. Not the same thing, but interesting to note:


mtnBook:~ $ whois rochester.edu
Name Servers:
      NS1.UTD.ROCHESTER.EDU 128.151.2.1
      NS2.UTD.ROCHESTER.EDU 128.151.7.6
      SIMON.CS.CORNELL.EDU
      DNS.CS.WISC.EDU

mtnBook:~ $ whois cornell.edu
Name Servers:
      BIGRED.CIT.CORNELL.EDU 128.253.180.2
      DNS.CIT.CORNELL.EDU 192.35.82.50
      CAYUGA.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU

mtnBook:~ $ whois ucsb.edu
Name Servers:
      NS1.UCSB.EDU 128.111.1.1
      NS2.UCSB.EDU 128.111.1.2
      KNOT.BROWN.EDU



There's a bunch more NYU/UCBerkeley, WUSTL/ULA, etc.

Several universities in Ohio already doing this

[kaminari42]

The University of Cincinnati, The Ohio State University, and the University of Miami (Ohio) are already doing this.

Re:One of the main problem is...

[ScrewMaster]

Everything you send offsite should be encrypted, and anyone accessing your computer should be jailed somehow.

The problem is, a lot of the people trying to access your computer nowadays want to put you in jail somehow.

Re:VPN connection over a 30Mbps link.

[More_Cowbell]

OK, must admit this was new to me. But from what I can tell through some quick research-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2

There have been times when the media have reported on a network called "Internet2." This is misleading since Internet2 is in fact a consortium and not a computer network. "Internet2" is sometimes used, albeit a misnomer, for the Abilene Network.

So I take a look at Abilenes website and find this map: http://abilene.internet2.edu/peernetworks/domestic .html

From what I can see here, It does not look like the Internet2 network reaches as far north as Maine.

Having been born and raised in Maine (living in CA now), this really comes as no surprise to me. There are only about 1.2 million people there, certainly considered the "last mile" by most providers (cell, cable, dsl...)

Re:VPN connection over a 30Mbps link.

[More_Cowbell]

Membership does not equal backbone connectivity.

http://www.internet2.edu/network/library/deploymen t_phases.pdf

http://www.internet2.edu/network/deployment.html