Companies located in Miami and in coastal areas in southern to central Florida faced mandatory evacuation by Wednesday and six more disasters were declared by companies in the insurance and retail industries. Platforms involved in the recovery included IBM ES9000 and 3090; Hewlett-Packard systems; Sun Microsystems equipment and two Workarea Recovery subscriptions for a total of 150 PC workstations.
As the hurricane churned northward, numerous Florida-based customers placed Comdisco on "alert status", that is, in full preparation to receive customers and initiate recoveries. A disaster declaration requires serious consideration on customers’ behalf and is never taken lightly.
With the hurricane poised to strike the U.S., Comdisco’s national customer support team continued to execute disaster alert protocol, including:
- Tracking Hurricane Georges through hourly updates from the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center;
- Identifying and contacting customers that could be affected by the hurricane;
- Reviewing with customers the preventive measures they should take to minimize vulnerability and avoid having to declare a disaster.
In speaking with companies in the forecast path of the hurricane, Comdisco urged customers to execute a real-time backup of mission critical data. With the small window of opportunity before them, customers captured recent transactions and information and reduced their recovery time since they weren’t completely reliant on data that was up to one week old.
Most disasters are sudden and completely unexpected, but in a regional event, such as a hurricane, flooding, or a severe winter storm, companies sometimes have time for last minute planning or activities that can have an impact on recovery. At this time, Comdisco also worked with customers to ensure their disaster declaration information was up-to-date, and assisted customers in contacting other vendors – off-site storage, and local and long distance carriers, for example, to place them on alert.
Comdisco advised several customers to move equipment from first floor and below ground data centers to higher floors to avoid water damage from potential flooding – grunt work, certainly, but with some areas of the Gulf Coast receiving up to 25 inches of rain, work that was well worth the sweat.
As a matter of course, Comdisco offers logistics assistance in transporting customer personnel to recovery facilities should a disaster declaration be necessary. Comdisco chartered a 727 to fly 50 customer employees from Florida to a Comdisco facility to quickly begin the recovery process. Arranging air travel, hotel accommodations, daycare, even pet care on customers’ behalf is common. Comdisco once found a stable for a customer’s horse during a recovery.
On Thursday, travel and business services industries weighed in with declarations for DEC Alpha systems and Workarea Recovery. Additionally, a global financial institution’s Tampa facility declared a disaster for its Tandem systems and sent 25 staff members to Comdisco’s midrange Advanced Recovery Services facility in the New York metro. Comdisco performs a nightly incremental backup for a mission critical back office process and a weekly full volume backup of the customer’s data.
The staffers worked three shifts for two days preparing to swing production from Tampa to New York metro facility, if necessary. The team reviewed processes and procedures and monitored data exchanges, systems backups and data restores, and remained on site until the threat of a sustained outage has passed.
With the hurricane over the Gulf Coast dumping torrential rains, five more declarations were received from business services customers and a government agency. These customers have business units supported by IBM ES/9000 and RS/6000, and Sun systems, and one of the customers also invoked their Workarea Recovery subscription.
By this time, customers that declared disasters earlier in the week were planning for the return home. The last Hurricane Georges-related declaration was rescinded on Wednesday, September 30. The good news is that 1998 hurricane season is in the home stretch.
Diane Laux is Senior Manager of Corporate Communications for Comdisco.
Comdisco has supported 42 hurricane-related recoveries in recent years, including those resulting from Hurricanes Andrew in August, 1992; Erin, August, 1995; Luis, September, 1995; Opal, October, 1995; and Bertha, July 1996. Overall, hurricanes account for 16 percent of all recoveries supported by Comdisco.
