Disaster Recovery: A Tape Survival Story
Computerworld is running a feature on how Estes Express Lines survived Hurricane Gaston dumping four feet of water into their data center. Dick Cosby, Estes’s systems administrator, is quoted as saying “You are out of your mind if you think you can live without tape. It makes zero sense to put up an all-SAN solution with data de-duplication. It is very expensive and not nearly as reliable.”
I had dinner with Dick at an IBM event a year ago. We spent most of dinner talking about how Estes had recovered from the hurricane. I was extremely impressed by Estes’s ability to fully recover even though the magnitude of the disaster outstripped anything they had planned for. These guys have earned the right to make observations about what does and doesn’t make sense in a disaster recovery/business continuance strategy. Unlike most of us in the vendor community, Estes has been there, done that, and lived to tell about it.
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