Sometimes despite the best disaster planning, project Scrum and in-house expertise, Murphy’s law steps in and leaves your IT department scrambling. What would YOU do if the unthinkable happened mid-project? The team at Alvin Community College (ACC) survived this nightmare and shares their story.
Disaster Generates Downtime
Shortly after finishing phase one of project to roll out email addresses, ACC was preparing for phase two of disaster recovery planning— redirecting authentication for emails and coursework. Then, Hurricane Harvey hit coastal Texas as a category 4 hurricane. Alvin received over 43 inches of rain over a 6-day period. When Klimpt and his team found water seeping under the raised floor of their data center and the HVAC not functioning properly, they made the gut-wrenching decision to power down the data center as part of their disaster planning procedure. The school was also closed for several days.
While damages to ACC buildings and infrastructure totaled $150,000, the college administration realized the impact on students was much greater. ACC graciously allowed affected students to drop classes and wave associated fees, subsequently adding $400,000 in lost revenue.
“The eXtensile Hybrid Cloud was a perfect solution in this application,” said Pete Petersen, Senior Solutions Architect for Logical Front. “Kelly already had the resources built-out and wanted the consistent experience of hosting his own data center on-premise, but with the peace of mind that all assets can be redirected to authenticate in the cloud.”
Ensuring Uptime in the Wake of the Storm
In just 7 months following disaster, Kelly Klimpt and his team at ACC turned tragedy into triumph using Logical Front’s eXtensile Hybrid Cloud (XHC). ACC has completed the steps in its disaster planning, using a database mirror, checked with fail-over testing. Their backup data now resides in a fully secure, tier 4 data center.
After a major disaster, system continuity is reassuring to the college and its students. Klimpt and his team fully appreciate the reassurance of maintaining this continuity in the case of another disaster. “It’s no longer one of those things that keeps me up at night.” commented Klimpt, “If the College loses network or power, students can still turn in classwork, and the teachers can still grade. I no longer have anxiety over it.”
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