World's Fifth Largest Manufacturer of Cables Recovers From Fire in Unique Way

Enterprise Networks & Servers, Aug 2004 by Stoddard, Bud

It was 6 p.m. on a Wednesday evening in March when Draka USA in Franklin, Mass., the world's fifth largest manufacturer of wire and cable solutions for industrial, commercial, military and defense use, learned that their Pennsylvania manufacturing facility had caught fire. A contractor who was doing repairs on the building had accidentally ignited the roof. Luckily, everyone got out of the building safely, but the remaining smoke meant that the staff couldn't return to the office for several days.

According to META Group Research, manufacturers stand to lose more than $1.6 million per hour of downtime, so to keep the company up and running, Draka relocated employees to an office in Long Island, N. Y. Learning that the fire had ripped through their facility, destroying wiring that made the network useless, from his kitchen at home Trevor Gardner, Draka's manager of Enterprise Operations, used online backup to restore their data from the servers in Pennsylvania to servers in Long Island.

With 10 remote offices throughout the U.S. and in Canada, Draka was previously challenged with data backups due to lack of resources at remote sites. Speaking of their previous use of tape-based backup, Gardner remarked that changing, cleaning, and sending them oifsite for archiving was problematic. In 2002, Draka made the switch to online backup, principally to consolidate, organize and in some cases, guarantee its backup procedures actually took place.

When fire struck, Draka alerted their online backup provider of the disaster who performed a cross restoration. By using the provider's interface, Draka was able to restore data from the providers Mass Storage vault to disparate recovery servers at the Long Island office. Without this service, he said he would have had to send the backup tape in a van to Long Island, recatalog it, hope that the drive was in a reasonable condition, and then restore the data to the hard drive in the new server.

Draka, who has approximately 280 gigabytes of storage, connects to the online backup provider each night to perform the backup allowing for uniformity which they did not have before with tape backup, providing peace of mind

In addition Gardner expressed that having external storage experts is an added bonus citing internal storage expertise at only 12 staff members.

According to the Strategic Research Institute, companies that aren't able to resume operations within 10 days of a disaster hit are not likely to survive. Luckily, using their contingency plan Draka was able to recover and resume operations quickly or their health and wellness could have been threatened.

Bud Stoddard

Bud Stoddard has over 20 years of experience in the data protection and storage industry and is the founder, president & CEO of AmeriVault Corp., developer of online server backup and recovery for business. For more information, visit www.amerivault.com.