Loyola makes more preparations
Meanwhile, at Loyola University's New Orleans campus, a key new IT disaster recovery component has been added since the 2005 hurricanes. It is an intermediate site hosted at an out of state location set up to maintain communications and a simplified version of the school's Web site that's available with a simple DNS change.
"We had a very full-fledged disaster recovery plan prior to Katrina," said Bret Jacobs, executive director of IT for the school. But even so, what they learned from those earlier storms was that even more preparations were needed.
"Because of Katrina, we lost power in New Orleans for an extended period of time, and we realized that we wanted to keep that particular presence on the World Wide Web all the time." To do that, the school added the intermediate site for a third level of redundancy in an emergency.
That intermediate site complements on-site emergency generator power and air conditioning for the IT department, as well as complete off-site critical systems redundancy provided by disaster recovery vendor SunGard Availability Services, Jacobs said.
Since Katrina, the school has also moved its course management system online and has it hosted remotely so that students can continue their classes over the Internet in the event the campus is closed due to emergency. "What we're trying to do is make sure the educational process is not interrupted," he said. "We're not a distance learning campus per se, but we're using some of those technologies." With the approach of Tropical Storm Gustav, the university's IT department and its disaster recovery vendor have been put on alert mode, Jacobs said. Full system backups are being performed daily and are being shipped offsite as part of a standard IT plan.
"We want to have our reactions institutionalized because you never know what a storm will do," Jacobs said.
The school conducts a mock IT disaster recovery exercise annually with SunGard, bringing up the systems live at a remote facility in Chicago to ensure that they'll work if needed in an emergency, he said. "Your plans have to be flexible and you have to be able to adapt them to whatever is thrown at you."
Loyola also canceled classes Friday, saying Gustav "posed a significant threat to the city of New Orleans" and ordered all students and staff to evacuate. It also suspended all school operations tomorrow, according to a message posted on its Web site.