my favorite DR story

Sun Mar 26 12:21:35 UTC 2006

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avyakata/67337020/

   This is Manion's Auction House in Kansas City, Kansas. The photo was 
taken the day after an F3 tornado went over the top of the site. The 
smooth, gray rectangle just below the trailer is not parking ... that is 
the floor of what used to be a ranch home on property which had been 
hastily tarpapered to protect the basement.

   The tornado took the top floor of the house, which contained about 
twenty PCs, four servers, all of their comm gear, and spread it in a 
thousand yard long debris field.

   Employees turned out and walked the debris field finger tip to finger 
tip, looking for customer consigned property and the contents of their 
office. They found every PC, every server, and every bit of 
communcations equipment. No one thought to take a picture of their Cisco 
3640, which was found under a Catepillar D-7 bulldozer which had been 
rolled two hundred yards by the storm.

  The business owner's house is just to the left of the area covered by 
the photo and it suffered minor damage. Their systems were brought there 
to a room in the basement and the IT guys set to work. Monitors were 
destroyed but every single PC was located and found to be operational. 
They lost one drive in one raid array on their servers but everything 
else was functional. We plugged their 3640, Local Director, and firewall 
back in and had them running again five hours after the storm, and that 
included my three hour drive time from Omaha.

  They had no off site backup of any of their data and there was no 
configuration information on their network beyond my recall of what I'd 
help install two years before the tornado. This is certainly a testament 
to the value of clean livin', but I sure wouldn't recommend that as a DR 
strategy.

-- 
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