Prepared for the Worst
No one likes to imagine the worst happening. Unfortunately, disasters do strike,
whether man-made or caused by nature. And with electronic devices, catastrophic
failure can happen at any time. Being prepared in case of an emergency is not only
prudent, but essential. The State of Utah is constantly making sure that they are
prepared for any event—retrofitting the state capitol building for earthquake safety
and implementing disaster plans for all types of emergencies.
Like most other workplaces, the busy office of the Governor of Utah relies on email
and online appointment scheduling to manage its daily business. More than 300
users of the Governor's post office keep it humming, using Novell GroupWise to
manage their email. Because these electronic communications are critical to the
business of the government, Mike Hussey, the GroupWise administrator for the
Governor’s office, decided to use GWAVA Reload. GWAVA Reload keeps hot backup
copies of the GroupWise post office on a separate server. This way, if something
were to happen to the main server, emails would be preserved safely.
Because Mike was anxious to get Reload online, he quickly installed Reload on a
surplus workstation with a large hard drive. Although Reload is designed to work
with high capacity servers, using this extra machine was a fast and inexpensive
solution.
Once Reload was up and running, small problems users had from accidentally deleting vital emails were easily fixed by themselves. Mike rarely had to worry about
email problems for the next two years. That suited Mike just fine since he had
plenty of other things on his plate.
The Server is Terminated
In March 2007, Governor Huntsman's office was busy preparing for a visit from
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The two governors would be discussing
an interstate pact to decrease global warming. Many emails with plans and information for the event were stored on the GroupWise email server.
On the Sunday night before Gov. Schwarzenegger's visit, the server volume housing
the GroupWise domain and post office crashed. Mike and his IT team worked hard,
but soon determined that none of the data on the server volume could be recovered,
including the post office. Fortunately, Mike was prepared with Reload and
knew he could switch over to the Reload machine. However, Mike knew he had
installed Reload on a workstation for a quick solution and hadn’t yet upgraded to a
bigger server. Reload would be put to the ultimate test. Was it up to running the
domain and post office for the entire office for a couple of days on an inferior
machine? Faced with no other option early on Monday morning, Mike decided to
make the switch.
Using Reload's push button disaster recovery option, Mike quickly got the Governor's
post office back up and running on the single workstation machine that was never
designed to run the entire GroupWise system. And Reload worked just fine, albeit a
little slower than usual. Emails again started flowing to and from the office's myriad
BlackBerries and critical information stored in users' emails was again available.
Governor Schwarzenegger arrived, the meetings got underway and the whole day
went smoothly. Soon, the interstate pact was signed by both governors.
Migrated in No Time
A couple of days later, Mike finished recreating the server volume and was ready to
move the post office data from the Reload machine back onto the mail server. With
Reload's migration feature, Mike was able to reload the majority of the data while
GroupWise was still up and running on the Reload machine. Then Mike transferred
all of the remaining data in a short, scheduled downtime, keeping email service up
and running for most of the time.