Users Talk Power Pains

IRVINE, Calif. -- Data Protection Summit -- Despite recent concern about pandemics, hurricanes, and terrorist attacks, electrical power remains the top disaster priority for most U.S. organizations, according to CIOs and IT managers who spoke here yesterday. (See CIOs Ponder Potential Pandemic, Beware of Hurricanes, and Disaster Recovery Reconsidered.)

Belinda Wilson, executive director of HP's business availability division, warned that energy should be at the forefront of firms' disaster planning. "Power is still the biggest trend; it's an issue that needs to be taken care of," she said, highlighting the twin challenge of outages and spiraling energy costs.

Many firms are even turning off the servers at their disaster recovery sites, according to panelist Bill Peldzus, director of storage architecture at consulting firm GlassHouse Technologies. "This is to save money, particularly in the large data centers," he said, adding that some of his customers have as much as 70 or 80 Tbytes spread across 250 servers at secondary sites.

Such is the level of concern about the rising power costs that Google and Yahoo recently chose to build massive new data centers on the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington in order to tap directly into local hydro-electric resources. (See Google, Google's Space Oddity, Google Groans Under Data Strain, and Get Users Involved, Says Yahoo Boss.)

"Power is the most important issue right now, then after that, other disasters," said Kitman Lee, systems analyst at the L.A. County Sanitation Districts, which was forced to add a diesel generator to its UPS systems in the aftermath of rolling blackouts in 2005.Better power facilities also prompted L.A. County Health Services to shift its data center from Figueroa St. in downtown L.A. to a site next to Union Station. "We made the move for more space, to make things more efficient and to take care of some of our power needs," explained Don Zimmer, the county's assistant security officer.

HP's Wilson related a story about hurricane Katrina to underline the importance of power. The vendor had sent trailers packed with technology to Louisiana in the aftermath of the hurricane but had to station armed guards outside one unit, which was housing a local bank's systems. "It wasn't for the money, it was for the generators," she said, adding that even the local sheriff's department had its generators stolen.

That said, Wilson warned users not to get too tied up in the technological aspects of disaster recovery. "The success of disaster recovery is 80 percent people, 15 percent data, and 5 percent technology," she said. "Guess where people spend the money? The technology."

The exec held up Chevron and Wells Fargo as examples of two firms that have got their priorities right. Chevron, for its part, has put its employees firmly at the front of its disaster recovery plan. "The first thing that they do in a regional disaster is to set up phones where families can make connections," said Wilson.

Likewise, Wells Fargo is focused on the human side of this problem. "Every single year they have an annual business continuity bootcamp," she explained, adding that around 300 people from across the firm attend the event. Each Chevron center also has a "champion" and a team appointed specifically to deal with disaster recovery.Wilson also got a laugh out of her audience yesterday when she explained that one organization has even prepared for armageddon. "I have only heard of one customer that has got a plan in place for a nuclear war, and that is the IRS."

A number of vendors, including IBM, have been touting business continuity solutions designed to help firms cope with the impact of a pandemic, which some experts predict could decimate parts of the U.S. workforce. (See Suppliers Prep for Pandemic, Will DOD Catch Flu?, IBM Prepares for Pandemics, and Panel Ponders Preparedness.)

While the possibility of a pandemic should not be ignored, HP's Wilson admitted that she is getting a bit sick of the hype around avian flu. "We keep talking about pandemics -- personally it makes me crazy."

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch