Ask Slashdot: How To Evacuate a Network 331
First time accepted submitter gpowers writes "I am the IT Manager for Shambhala Mountain Center, near Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. We are in the pre-evacuation area for the High Park Fire. What is the best way to load 50+ workstations, 6 servers, IP phones, networking gear, printers and wireless equipment into a 17-foot U-Haul? We have limited packing supplies. We also need to spend as much time as possible working with the fire crew on fire risk mitigation."
Pictures (Score:5, Interesting)
Take lots of pictures before you unplug your cables. It will save you time when you have to reconnect everything.
Start with what you can least afford to lose. (Score:4, Interesting)
Whatever stores data first -- if it's a SAN, then your RAID chassis and metadata controllers, and if you have time, the SAN fabric switches and cabling, but you can replace the latter if you have to, and if it's ordinary SAS, the servers if they're all internal storage, or the RAID chassis or whatever's external. Definitely grab any non-offsite backup media with that. Rest of it in descending order of priority after you grab the most valuable stuff, mostly to avoid having to replace it.
Best strategy overall is to think "what if we had to abandon this evacuation mid-process and run?" Try to have what you most want already in the truck at any given moment, and concentrate on data before hardware -- the data is far more valuable in most cases.
If you haven't done an offsite backup, for god/dess' sake do one *now* and get the backup media to a safe location .. :/
Re:You don't. (Score:5, Interesting)
The "best" way to evacuate a data center is to already have off-site back-up for your data in place, drop a fresh copy to portable media, and walk out. The hardware should be insured. The life of your and your people (at least some of whom should probably be helping their families evacuate) are far more valuable than a few months of making your insurer pay for rented hardware until your new machines show up.
Well, it's obvious the poster here was handed the job of preparing a disaster recovery plan and has no professional experience doing so... probably was given the assignment by his manager who had no idea the complexities of the task. If the OP is in that position, then it's also likely they won't see any benefit to offsite backup, or they'll blunder by putting the offsite backups in the boss' house which is three miles downwind... assuming he can even convince them to budget for it.
In that case, I'd say buy some quick-disconnect drive enclosures (the kind where you lift a lever and a harddrive is now dangling in your hand), write a formal letter of protest outlining exactly why you're not responsible for the company being wiped out, what mitigation steps you'd recommend with a proper budget, and keep a copy in a safety deposit box or some 'cloud' service far, far away from you... because yeah. -_-
Story time! I worked for a Fortune 500 company that connected consumer-grade 300watt rated UPS to racks of equipment... they were unaware of the risk of fire until I explained to them that with 2,000+ store locations and about 50 distribution centers, and 3 corporate headquarters, while the odds of any one of them failing catastrophically due to current overload was low, each one of those buildings experiences a 'power loss event' an average of a dozen times a year... so it became very likely that they would fail and cause a fire, which wouldn't be covered by insurance. Management tried to ignore it, but somehow (wink, wink) legal found out about it, and forced the Board to fix the problem post-haste to avert having to pay 50 million plus to rebuild the burned out husk of a store after the fire chief finds the flash point was a piece of equipment that was massively under-rated for the job.
Disaster planning requires a good understanding of probabilities and statistics. That understanding is surprisingly rare in the business world, despite what most people think.
Re:YES! Save only hard drives (Score:4, Interesting)
Hard drives are both the most valuable, and the most fragile part. Do not load them in a stiff suspension vehicle like a truck, as this bounces the drives. Choose a soft-suspension normal car.
I know someone who uses a Citroen Xantia estate with the hydraulic suspension modified to be slightly softer than normal for moving delicate optical instruments. It just comes down to a little adjustment of sphere pressure and damper ports.
Even unmodified, if the suspension is in good condition you can't even feel speed humps at 60mph, just hear the "ba-dunk" as you go over them.
Re:Uh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking at the Map [goo.gl] there is nothing to worry about.
His building is far from any significant stand of trees. Two guys with chainsaws and another driving a 4 wheel drive truck can
drop every tree close to the building in 20 minutes, and tow them to an open field.
Use a backup generator to keep his well pumping (if no city water) and put a lawn sprinkers on the roof.
One wonders if this wasn't just out out there to drive traffic to his website.
Re:Uh... (Score:2, Interesting)
There is, in fact, a radical difference between a structural fire which strikes without warning, and a wildfire which burns for days or weeks at a time and whose progress is tracked by state and federal agencies. If you are basing your disaster response plan for the latter off your conceptions of the former your'e doing it wrong.