Re: Disaster recovery solutions

Rich,

I would caution against looking at a quick one or two day solution. Having actually experienced a real disaster quite a few years ago (on a S/36, but concepts are the same), it took more than one or two day's worth of time. I remember having to restore the operating system, and testing that to make sure all pieces installed correctly as well as PTFs. Then the application was installed and tested. I had to make sure all of those pieces were working. There were user developed libraries and other settings that needed to be tested too. The security had to be restored and tested. Communications connections configured and tested. I could never have done all the testing and planning in one or two days time. I was working at a bank, and having ample planning and testing time allowed the bank to experience a real disaster and not miss any of its daily deadlines. I imagine you want to experience as small amount of plant outage as possible, so making sure the plants can communicate with the D/R site is key, and that can only be tested by going to the site and making sure the communications are set up properly between the plants and D/R site and you have a good plan to make the switchover from normal mode to D/R mode.

Hope this helps.

Doug