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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.'"
Case of the Great Hot-Wife Swap
Pity. It being a Saturday, I kind of wanted to read that article.
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
We have many clients that mirror backups between East and West coast. They may be connected at each end at that speed, but they are almost assuredly not achieving throughput at that rate.
YMMV, but there are 3000 miles to deal with here. I've never been able to achieve speeds like that, and we have some seriously fat pipes in our data centers.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
...that you might have to accept the legal responsibilies of the site that is being backed up. It's not just a simple exchange of providing corresponding services... Take it down to a personal level... who would you trust to use your personal computer as a backup server (in a reciprocal manner)? No one that hasn't your full and complete trust is my guess. Encryption would provide some protection but this isn't about data backup but service fallback.
So unless you have some kind of legal agreement covering your actual risks it's not for everyone. But for large scale organisations, with real legal clout, like universities it might makes sense. But not for individuals.
CIA, FBI, CSIS, KGB, MI5...
It is the most secure backup system in the world.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Maybe his parents are Ma Bell and Uncle Sam.
Rumor has it they've been in bed together for years.