Disaster Recovery Plan
Do you have one?
Why not? In my case, it’s because I just started at this company, but I really should have gotten on this ASAP when hurricane season started. We got lucky. Everyone got out and we were able to get all our essential equipment (ie. server and associated drives) out of our New Orleans office. But, what if we hadn’t been?
I was thinking about that a lot as I ran around Thursday and Friday trying to quickly, with little notice, cobble together a network for the folks from NOLA to use. At least they’re able to bill, so we have some income and can keep some of the folks from over there employed. Not sure how long we can maintain that, but at least it’s something. I actually made them their own, isolated network with their own hub. (Yes, “hub”, not “switch”. I didn’t have any spares laying around!) We had to buy a printer and wait until some of the equipment came over from New Orleans to test everything, but I did get them working. It’s a bit of a mess, too, with cables hanging all over the three cubes that they’ve occupied, but it’s better than nothing. This way, we can keep at least some of the people who made it through employed.
It’s a little sickening to me when I think of it, but this disaster is going to make my company a lot of money. There are all kinds of things out in the Gulf that need to be repaired and, frankly, to get the oil flowing again, price isn’t much of an object. I hope we keep it from getting too out of control, though. I’m all for making money, but I’d hate to see gouging going on.
Oh, and our Iridium phones came in, though there were some parts missing. Still I managed to get them charged up and teach the two guys who needed to know, how to use them. It’s amazing to me how small they are. Not really any bigger than the old-style cell phones. The antenna, however, is gianormous! Need to do funky stuff to call to and from these bad boys, too, but I got dialing instructions off the Iridium website. All in all, very cool. Now, if we could just get past the “Emergency Calls Only” message, we’d really have something!
You know, I’m getting invaluable experience here, but I’d really rather not. I’d rather this never happened. This is going to mess up the local economy for years and years, not to mention the national economy. This disaster shut down the busiest seaport in the United States. That impact will be felt for a very long time, all over the world.
If you’re the kind that prays, now would be a good time.
