Friday, August 13, 2010

Disaster in Rancho Cordova Data Center....

Once a year my work has what they call Disaster recovery week to test our backup plan in case there is a disaster at our location.  What happens is they take the backup tapes to our backup location and load the information on our backup machines and then run production on those systems to see if we could switch over with as little break in service as possible.  All sounds like a good idea and every company should have a disaster recovery plan.  The reason I am writing this entry is because my company actually plays out the fake disaster with a long detail explanation of what happened that caused the problem.
For example this year the disaster was that an airplane engine fell out of the sky and came through our roof taking out our communications and some of our server cabinets in a particular part of our Data Center.  I was listening in to the conference call where they are asking about the condition of the building, if anyone was injured as well as if the fire department was on site.  To which the participant answer as if this is really going on.  So although there is nothing wrong I hear one guy say yes the fire department was here and there was a fire in our data center from the debris of the engine.  I had to keep from laughing as I listened to the call because it was all just make believe.  I can understand why they have to act like this is real but to hear adults who for a live do not pretend things are happening which are not talk like they are was funny to me.  Perhaps next year I will be part of the DR testing and have to pretend some horrific accident has taken place and I am now responsible for getting the business running from our backup location.  Oh the fun we have at work.

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