Tales from the past – Disaster Recovery testing

A long time ago in a datacenter far, far away….

Turmoil has engulfed the IT landscape. Within the newly formed digital universe,
corporate empires are becoming more and more
dependent on their digital data and computer systems.
To avoid downtime when getting hit by an evil strike, the corporations are
starting to build disaster recovery capabilities in their operational architectures.

While the congress of the Republic endlessly debates whether
the high cost of decent recovery methods is justified,
the Supreme CIO Chancellor has secretly dispatched a Jedi Apprentice,
one of the guardians of reliability and availability,
to validate existing recovery plans…

Another story from my days as UNIX engineer in the late nineties. I obfuscated all company or people names to protect their reputation or disclose sensitive information, but former colleagues might recognize parts of the stories or maybe everything. Also, some of it is a long time ago and I cannot be sure all I say is factually correct. The human memory is notoriously unreliable.

In those days, our company was still relying on tape backup as the only Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy. The main datacenter had a bunch of large tape silos, where, on a daily basis, trays of tapes were unloaded, packed and labeled in a small but strong suitcase, and sent to an off-site location (Pickup Truck Access Method) so the invaluable data could be salvaged in case our entire datacenter would go up in flames.

Tales from the past – Overheated Datacenter

A long time ago in a datacenter far, far away….

It is a period of digital revolution.

Rebel Dot Com companies, striking from hidden basements and secret lofts,
have won their first fights against long-standing evil corporate empires.

During the battles, rebel geeks have managed to invent secret technology to
replace corporations old ultimate weapons,
such as snail mail and public telephone networks currently powering the entire planet.

Contracted by the Empire’s sinister CIOs, the UNIX Engineer and author of this blog
races against the clock across the UNIX root directories,
to prepare new IT infrastructure for the upcoming battle –
while at the same time, trying to keep the old weapons of mass applications available and running
as best as he can to safeguard the customers freedom in the digital galaxy.

In the late nineties, before I switched to the light side of the Force and joined EMC, I was UNIX engineer and working as a contractor for financial institutions. This is a first in a number of stories from that period and later. I obfuscated all company or people names to protect their reputation or disclose sensitive information, but former colleagues might recognize parts of the stories or maybe everything. Also, some of it is a long time ago and I cannot be sure all I say is factually correct. The human memory is notoriously unreliable.

It was a friday late afternoon.

Everyone in my department already left for the weekend, but I was working on critical infrastructure project that was on a tight deadline, otherwise I guess I would have left already, too.

At some point I needed to re-install a UNIX server, which in those days was done by physically booting them from an install CD – so I needed to go to the datacenter room and get physical console access to get that going. I walked to the datacenter floor, which hosted several large UNIX systems, a mainframe, a number of EMC Symmetrix storage systems, network gear, lots of Intel servers mostly running Windows NT and maybe a few Novell.

There were large tape libraries for backup, lots of server racks, fire extinguishers and whatever you typically find in a large datacenter floor like that. I used my keycard to open the door to the datacenter and stepped in… The first thing I thought was, wow, it’s warm in here…