An Office of the CTO Guest Blog
By Colleen McMillan
No one ever really knows when disaster will strike.
But over the years, state and local governments have launched some great awareness campaigns to help us prepare for the inevitable, whether a hurricane, tornado, earthquake or even an act of terrorism. We’ve identified safe places to ride out storms and many have put away survival kits that include drinking water, first-aid supplies, flashlights and a battery-powered radio.
As a native of Florida, I learned early to respect the power of hurricanes, despite their friendly sounding names: Andrew, Katrina and, most recently, Irene, just to name a few. I know folks in California who talk about their preparedness plan for the day the big quake hits. And certainly, people in places like Texas and Kansas know how to react when the tornado siren starts to wail.
But what happens after the shaking stops or the winds and rain move on? Many cities have seen disasters go from bad to worse because communications systems failed, computer systems were destroyed or emergency officials couldn’t access important information. Many of these localities have also long recognized the importance of putting disaster recovery plans into place. But the reality has been that the costs associated with such plans have been too high for budget-constrained schools and government agencies.
Thankfully, technology is evolving in a way that changes all that.
Improved Disaster Recovery with Virtualization
Consider the city of Fairfield, California, which has been shifting toward virtualized environments for some of its most critical city services applications, including computer-aided dispatch and records management systems for the city’s police and fire departments.
That city has seen significant cost reductions - not only in equipment costs but also in related areas such as software licenses and power consumption - since rolling out a VMware virtual environment. But the added bonus comes in knowing that the disaster recovery capabilities also have improved. No longer is the system held captive to a physical location. It’s flexible enough to move when needed.
An example of that flexibility has been realized in Washington County, Pennsylvania, where the datacenter for the 911 facilities was upgraded from physical servers to a virtual IT infrastructure. The challenge of upgrading an around-the-clock operation like a 911 center, which cannot afford to be compromised for one minute, posed some challenges. But virtualization came to the rescue for the migration process, as well, allowing upgrades to take place without even the dispatchers seeing any interruptions. Washington County IT director Dan Briner said:
"The biggest constraint was the fact that we were not constructing a new building — this was an in-place upgrade. That meant we couldn’t just shut things down and move people into another facility while we were performing the upgrade; the call center needed to stay up and running while the upgrade occurred. During several of the key facilities upgrades, while we upgraded the electrical service, or installed new UPS units, VMware provided the means to migrate key services to different ESX hosts — again, while live 911 calls were being dispatched."
Beyond the migration, though, the upgrade has also built redundancy into system. Briner said there have been several examples where the new system has kept operations online during both planned and unplanned outages. He added:
"Basically, we’ve been able to move our call center light years ahead of where it was in terms of survivability. Prior to virtualization, it could have taken anywhere from an hour to days to get all our public safety systems up and running after an outage. With VMware Infrastructure 3, the systems fail over in less than a few seconds."
Learning Hard Lessons from 9/11
That brings me back to preparedness for disasters. During times of crisis, public safety officials need information to make timely, life-saving decisions. When we paused in remembrance 10 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, let's also remember how early responders struggled to communicate in a crisis situation, especially because so many of the communications networks were powered by antenna technology at the top of the towers.
Today, technology allows for flexibility of data, the type of flexibility that gets critical information out of silos and into the hands of the people who need it most.
In a workshop at the recent VMworld conference in Las Vegas, a school administrator shared a story about an agreement with a "sister school" in another city that had his school’s virtual machines backed up. In the event of an emergency at his school, the staff at the sister school would take over - not just in getting information out to the right people but also allowing the impacted school employees to worry less about how they would get back to work and more on restoring order to their own lives.
I can’t help but ask the question of how cities and counties can find similar ways to work together to support each other during times of crisis. How can they share their resources and information efficiently and, more importantly, without interruption?
The eastern coast of the United States was recently impacted by two natural events in a week’s time - a rare earthquake in the Washington DC region and a hurricane that wreaked havoc from the Carolinas to New England. The ground rarely shakes in Washington DC. And it’s not every hurricane season that officials evacuate New York City for an approaching storm.
It all just further proves that no one knows exactly when and where disaster might strike. What we do know, which is good news for everyone, is that there’s lots we can do to be better prepared.
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