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

Higher Ed.

[saintlupus]

From what I understand, this is pretty common in higher ed -- in fact, the college that I work for is currently setting up something similar with another college in the area. Not cross-continent redundancy, true, but enough to keep things going should there be a smaller disaster in the area. If all of Western New York is wiped out, I don't really care if people can get their email.

This really came to the forefront with the beating the New Orleans area colleges took during Katrina; from what I recall, Loyola and Tulane were really unprepared and suffered for it.

--saint