Many great stories are circulating about people and companies helping each other restore their homes and businesses in the aftermath of what is now called “SuperStorm Sandy.” People may joke about New York attitudes, but many New Yorkers have demonstrated their devotion to one another in many ways.

Most of the stories we’ve seen lately about the magic people performed for each other have to do with cloud services, or software recovery, but there’s a story that was just published on Jan. 14 on the Dell website entitled “Hurricane Sandy – No Match for Dell PowerEdge Servers” that is completely about the durability of Dell’s servers despite the disaster.

It’s important to remember that a disaster recovery story is never really about hardware. Hardware usually gets replaced and that’s that. The underlying value story here is all about the data, the all-important highest-value asset a company owns. 

In this case study, the customer was in the midst of upgrading to a 12^th Generation Dell PowerEdge 720 meant to help support its growing use of virtualization and strengthening the business continuity plan.  Clearly, Hurricane Sandy never read that plan. Instead she submerged the customer’s premises, including their data center under several feet of a toxic mix of saltwater, battery acid and whatever else floated in. The photos of the server rack included in the case study show them to be horrifyingly brown and rusted.

Here’s the Solution in this story…

The customer rinsed the servers with fresh water, then filled them with rice to absorb as much of the moisture as possible.

This customer may be one of the few to be thankful that it took the Long Island Power Authority way too long to restore power. In this case it gave the rice time to do its job so that once power was restored, so were the servers. The Dell splash screens came right up, while the fans were spitting out excess rice, and everything was working fine. Needless to say the customer was astounded and thrilled to have its data back and to restore the usefulness of their servers. 

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

There are multiple steps in creating the best possible strategy. 

·        • The first step is preparation for prevention.  A solid data backup plan with both on-premise service for immediate restoration in the event of a server failure, and an online remote data backup plan for preservation of data in the event of an overwhelming physical catastrophe.

·        • The second step is a Business Continuity failover plan to determine what happens when something goes wrong. How do we keep the business operating while we work to restore full functionality? Where will the servers be located? How will the users access them?

·        • Then there is the disaster recovery plan to determine what steps will be taken to restore the primary systems from restoration or replacement of hardware through restoration of backed-up data.

Most important to any of these steps is the selection process. Always prefer the proven performer.