Disaster Recovery Journal- Volume 18, Issue 1 - Winter 2005 Issue - Cable Manufacturer Recovers From Fire in a Unique Way

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Winter 2005 Issue

DISASTER RECOVERY
JOURNAL

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Pat McAnally, SunGard Availability Services
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Cable Manufacturer Recovers From Fire in a Unique Way

By BUD STODDARD

It was 6 p.m. on a Wednesday in March when Draka USA in Franklin, Mass. – the world’s fifth largest manufacturer of wire and cable solutions for industrial, commercial, military, and defense use – learned their Pennsylvania manufacturing facility had caught fire. A contractor who was doing repairs on the building had accidentally ignited the roof. Luckily, everyone got out of the building safely. However, the remaining smoke meant the staff couldn’t return to the office for several days.
According to META Group Research, manufacturers stand to lose more than $1.6 million per hour of downtime, so avoiding such downtime was a top priority. Draka relocated several key employees to an office in Long Island, N.Y.
Learning that the fire had ripped through their facility, destroying wiring that made the network useless, Trevor Gardner, Draka’s manager of enterprise operations, accessed the company’s data from his kitchen at home. Gardner used online backup to restore their data from the servers in Pennsylvania to servers in Long Island. “If we hadn’t had online backup, we would have been in big trouble,” said Gardner.
When fire struck, Draka alerted their online backup provider of the disaster who performed a cross restoration. By using the provider’s interface, Draka was able to restore data from the provider’s mass storage vault to disparate recovery servers at the Long Island office. Without this service, he said he would have had to send the backup tape in a van to Long Island, re-catalog it, hope the drive was in a reasonable condition, and then restore the data to the hard drive in the new server.
Draka, who has approximately 280 gigabytes of storage, connects to the online back-up provider each night to perform the backup allowing for uniformity, which they did not have before with tape backup. In addition, Gardner expressed that having external storage experts is an added bonus, citing internal storage expertise at 12 staff members.
According to the Strategic Research Institute, companies that aren’t able to resume operations within 10 days of a disaster hit are not likely to survive. Luckily, using their contingency plan Draka was able to recover and resume operations quickly or their health and wellness could have been threatened.

Bud Stoddard has more than 20 years of experience in the data protection and storage industry and is the founder, president and CEO of AmeriVault Corp., the pioneer of online server backup and recovery for business. For more information, visit www.amerivault.com.