Barbara Cortese, IST–CCS
On March 22-23, the Berkeley campus completed its first business recovery "hotsite" test for a critical application. A combined effort of staff from throughout IST, the Payroll Office, and the Office of Business Resumption, the test simulated a disaster on the Berkeley campus that would have required running the Payroll environment offsite. Using equipment based in Boulder, Colorado, the Berkeley team recreated a mirror of the campus computing environment, successfully restoring the operating system as well as the payroll database and application software. As a result, the campus will be able to make payroll in the event a disaster disables the campus data center.
The payroll system (PPS) was chosen as the first application for IST's business resumption project because it is a single-platform system. Most other central campus systems employ multiple platforms, making them less suitable for a first-time hotsite test. Now that the campus has experience with the hotsite environment, the methods and formats used to plan payroll business resumption will be used as a prototype for development of recovery procedures for other systems and applications.
For our first foray into offsite recovery, it took the campus nearly two years to develop and test the comprehensive procedures needed to restore the payroll system after a disaster. The campus will now be able to test six additional systems in the next two years. In August, the Administrative Systems Department began business resumption planning for the campus accounts payable system (CARS); Student Information Systems office will begin planning for the registration system in mid-September. In addition, Central Computing Services (CCS) is working on recovery procedures for infrastructure systems: CalMail, the campus web page, and CalNet Authentication and Directory Services. Having these systems available after a disaster will facilitate the resumption of business across many departments on campus. Finally, the Berkeley Financial System (BFS) will be prepped for disaster recovery as soon as the upgrades to the system that are currently under way have been completed.
While CCS is coordinating recovery procedures for central campus systems, the Office of Business Resumption is working with IST to assist campus departments that maintain and operate their own systems. The DMS (Departmentally Managed Systems) project was initiated in January 2004, to help departments with independent systems plan for business resumption. This fall will see the first in a series of meetings that will provide information on IT recovery to related groups of departments. One group will be made up of units that are Departmental Operations Centers (DOC), which work under the Emergency Operations Center to provide operational support following a disaster. Another group will consist of departments that feed information into the campus payroll system. Additional meetings will be held over the course of a year for other departments that maintain independent systems that feed information into central campus financial and student systems.
Berkeley is not the only UC campus that is beginning to address recovery of IT systems that are vital to campus operations. Business resumption was on the agenda of the first meeting of the Joint Data Center Management Group in March. At that meeting, the heads of campus computer centers agreed to investigate ways in which the campuses can cooperate to assist each other in disaster situations and reduce the cost of outsourcing recovery services.
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