Disaster recovery/business continuity

Folks,
Had a great conference call on this topic yesterday afternoon
(3/19/09). As promised you can find a link to the recording of the
call at http://tinyurl.com/d7rgn4. In addition the callers agreed
that a wiki was in order to help organize thoughts and plans on the
subject of disaster recovery and business continuity. The wiki is now
available at http://wiki.cali.org/disaster. You will need a CALI
account to contribute, but it is publicly viewable. I would encourage
everyone the list to participate in the wiki by sharing their schools
plans in these areas. There is an RSS feed at
http://tinyurl.com/cyxazh that you can use to track the progress of
the wiki. Finally, there will be a number of sessions at CALIcon09 in
Boulder that will be related to this topic and I'll have more on that
later.

Thanks,
Elmer.

In the post-Katrina time frame CALI offered to work with law schools
to setup some sort of joint effort on this front, but we quickly ran
out of steam as no one really came forward to work with us. We could
certainly pick this up again since it seems to be on folks' minds
again.
Since sitting at the gate at DIA tapping on my blackberry I don't have
access to everything, but John and I have lots of notes on this
subject. I'd think a conference call sometime within the next 10 - 14
with interested directors on the line might be a good idea. Does that
sound like something folks would be interested in investing an hour
in?

Thanks,
Elmer.

On 3/11/09, Doug Edmunds <edmunds@unc.edu> wrote:
> I'm not terribly active on the list, I'll admit, so please forgive me if
> this has come up in recent months (...though I didn't see any evidence
> of it in reviewing recent message headers). I serve on Carolina Law's
> internal crisis response team (CRT), a group that came into being a
> couple years ago after a wall of our 40-year-old building decided to
> buckle out and nearly collapse one lovely Friday morning early in the
> fall semester. That's another story that's better shared over beers at
> CALI...
>
> Anyway, one of the items that's come out of the CRT is creating a "check
> in" web site, sort of like what cropped up after 9/11, where all our
> students, staff, and faculty could go simply to say, "I'm alive, OK,
> here in etc" in the event of a major catastrophe. This,
> in turn, led to thinking about the fact that our redundant web servers
> are both parked in a data center here on campus, and that we rely on the
> campus LDAP system for authentication into our CMS and internal website,
> my.law.unc.edu. If all campus is affected, in other words, we are SOL
> (see, more acronyms!).
>
> My question, then, is simple: has anyone out there arranged for
> colocation of their web servers for disaster recovery/business
> continuity? Better still, like Tulane did post-Katrina, have any of your
> schools developed agreements with peer institutions out-of-state or far
> from your region who host a mirrored version of your website(s)? In
> light of the budget crisis everywhere and high cost for professional
> colocation services, this latter arrangement seems like an appealing
> possibility.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
> Doug
> --
> Doug Edmunds
> Assistant Dean for Information Technology
> UNC School of Law
> 100 Ridge Road, CB#3380
> Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3380
> 919-843-9208 phone
> 919-962-1277 fax
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>

Doug,

We've been playing around with ning[1] recently for other purposes, but it might be useful for this sort of continuity scenario. You could create an invitation-only ning site - then keep a list of people to invite in the event of a disaster in a CSV file on a thumb drive. Another approach would be to invite people now, but stress that this is an alternative communications tool only for use in a disaster. I would assume that your check-in site would not want to rely on having access to UNC email, so you would want to gather alternate addresses ahead of time and those would be the addresses to which you send invitations/communications. Ning does give you the ability to do a broadcast notification to all of your members, which is nice and for a small fee you can configure your own domain.

Google apps for domains could also be used as a business continuity tool - the great advantage there is that they have LDAP sync tools[2] that can help with account management. Of course, the other advantage is that a huge number of students already have gmail accounts and are somewhat familiar with the google suite of tools.

The other gorilla in the room is Facebook. You could set up a page on Facebook for UNC Law. You could either publish it now or not. Add a discussions tab to the page and then invite people to check in. You would have relatively little control over the site and not much privacy; however, it might have the greatest likelihood of actually being used in an emergency situation and it's possible that you would want others outside of the institution to be able to check-in as well.

We hosted Tulane's site after Katrina - and there were some very heated discussions within that community in the wake of that disaster; I'm not sure that I would have wanted those shared with the public.

Best,

Ben

.. 1 http://emorylaw.ning.com/ is the site we're playing around with; the main ning site is at http://www.ning.com. If anyone is interested in the emorylaw ning site, just send me an email and I'll send you an invite. We're looking at it as a modern forum replacement. One potential stopper for us is that it's easy for users to change their names and other profile details on the site.
.. 2 http://tinyurl.com/bpvyow

On 3/11/09 2:31 PM, "Doug Edmunds" <edmunds@unc.edu> wrote:

I'm not terribly active on the list, I'll admit, so please forgive me if
this has come up in recent months (...though I didn't see any evidence
of it in reviewing recent message headers). I serve on Carolina Law's
internal crisis response team (CRT), a group that came into being a
couple years ago after a wall of our 40-year-old building decided to
buckle out and nearly collapse one lovely Friday morning early in the
fall semester. That's another story that's better shared over beers at
CALI...

Anyway, one of the items that's come out of the CRT is creating a "check
in" web site, sort of like what cropped up after 9/11, where all our
students, staff, and faculty could go simply to say, "I'm alive, OK,
here in etc" in the event of a major catastrophe. This,
in turn, led to thinking about the fact that our redundant web servers
are both parked in a data center here on campus, and that we rely on the
campus LDAP system for authentication into our CMS and internal website,
my.law.unc.edu. If all campus is affected, in other words, we are SOL
(see, more acronyms!).

My question, then, is simple: has anyone out there arranged for
colocation of their web servers for disaster recovery/business
continuity? Better still, like Tulane did post-Katrina, have any of your
schools developed agreements with peer institutions out-of-state or far
from your region who host a mirrored version of your website(s)? In
light of the budget crisis everywhere and high cost for professional
colocation services, this latter arrangement seems like an appealing
possibility.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Doug
--
Doug Edmunds
Assistant Dean for Information Technology
UNC School of Law
100 Ridge Road, CB#3380
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3380
919-843-9208 phone
919-962-1277 fax
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Doug,
Co-locating mail/web servers with another law school is something we
thought about here at Loyola New Orleans post-Katrina. But being dependent
on the univesity IT, which didn't get e-mail and the web page back up for
about 11 or 12 days after Katrina, we're really not able to take our own
precautions. They now say their back-up procedure won't take that long to
get running, but the most visible change the university made is that that
Blackboard is co-located on the company's server. While not ideal, that
can serve as a back-up means of communicating with law students in an
emergency.

Brian Huddleston bhuddle@loyno.edu
Senior Reference Librarian http://www.loyno.edu/~bhuddle
Loyola University New Orleans College of Law
Office Phone: 1-504-861-5486 Office Fax: 1-504-861-5895

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009, Doug Edmunds wrote:

> I'm not terribly active on the list, I'll admit, so please forgive me if this
> has come up in recent months (...though I didn't see any evidence of it in
> reviewing recent message headers). I serve on Carolina Law's internal crisis
> response team (CRT), a group that came into being a couple years ago after a
> wall of our 40-year-old building decided to buckle out and nearly collapse
> one lovely Friday morning early in the fall semester. That's another story
> that's better shared over beers at CALI...
>
> Anyway, one of the items that's come out of the CRT is creating a "check in"
> web site, sort of like what cropped up after 9/11, where all our students,
> staff, and faculty could go simply to say, "I'm alive, OK, here in town> etc" in the event of a major catastrophe. This, in turn, led to
> thinking about the fact that our redundant web servers are both parked in a
> data center here on campus, and that we rely on the campus LDAP system for
> authentication into our CMS and internal website, my.law.unc.edu. If all
> campus is affected, in other words, we are SOL (see, more acronyms!).
>
> My question, then, is simple: has anyone out there arranged for colocation of
> their web servers for disaster recovery/business continuity? Better still,
> like Tulane did post-Katrina, have any of your schools developed agreements
> with peer institutions out-of-state or far from your region who host a
> mirrored version of your website(s)? In light of the budget crisis everywhere
> and high cost for professional colocation services, this latter arrangement
> seems like an appealing possibility.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
> Doug

Doug,

I am interested in this kind of arrangement as well. I sent an email to
Teknoids a while back and did not get a big response. Perhaps there could be
a session at CALI where those interested in this type of arrangement could
get together and exchange ideas, contact information, etc.?

Tron

-----Original Message-----
From: teknoids-bounces@ruckus.law.cornell.edu
[mailto:teknoids-bounces@ruckus.law.cornell.edu] On Behalf Of Doug Edmunds
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 2:32 PM
To: Teknoids
Subject: [teknoids] Disaster recovery/business continuity

I'm not terribly active on the list, I'll admit, so please forgive me if
this has come up in recent months (...though I didn't see any evidence
of it in reviewing recent message headers). I serve on Carolina Law's
internal crisis response team (CRT), a group that came into being a
couple years ago after a wall of our 40-year-old building decided to
buckle out and nearly collapse one lovely Friday morning early in the
fall semester. That's another story that's better shared over beers at
CALI...

Anyway, one of the items that's come out of the CRT is creating a "check
in" web site, sort of like what cropped up after 9/11, where all our
students, staff, and faculty could go simply to say, "I'm alive, OK,
here in etc" in the event of a major catastrophe. This,
in turn, led to thinking about the fact that our redundant web servers
are both parked in a data center here on campus, and that we rely on the
campus LDAP system for authentication into our CMS and internal website,
my.law.unc.edu. If all campus is affected, in other words, we are SOL
(see, more acronyms!).

My question, then, is simple: has anyone out there arranged for
colocation of their web servers for disaster recovery/business
continuity? Better still, like Tulane did post-Katrina, have any of your
schools developed agreements with peer institutions out-of-state or far
from your region who host a mirrored version of your website(s)? In
light of the budget crisis everywhere and high cost for professional
colocation services, this latter arrangement seems like an appealing
possibility.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Doug