World Trade Center Disaster Recovery:

Disaster Recovery Companies:

 

    The destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 had a huge impact on the  companies inside. With all equipment destroyed, these companies needed help keeping their businesses running. The normally low-profile disaster recovery industry, which offers corporations a safety net in times of trouble, had it's hands full. Usually, the trouble companies experience is a hurricane or fire, not a massive terror attack that left thousands of workers without a desk, phone, computer; everything they need to operate on a daily basis.

    SunGard is one of the big three disaster recovery companies in the industry, along with Comdisco of Illinois and the largest of all, Westchester-based IBM. Since the destruction of the Twin Towers, thousands of workers have moved from lower Manhattan to temporary offices operated by the three companies around the metropolitan area. These offices, called hot sites, usually sit almost empty, ready for workers to move in at a moment's notice.

    Technology is the main focus of disaster recovery, and the easiest to safeguard. The federal government requires financial services companies to have an emergency plan to protect customers' data. So files are copied frequently, sometimes immediately, to off-site computers by companies such as IBM, SunGard, and Comdisco. As a result, little information was lost Sept. 11.

 

IBM had about 1,200 customers within a few blocks of the World Trade Center.

 

SunGard is accommodating 200 displaced workers in two large rooms in a Jersey City high-rise.

 

Comdisco has three sites in the metropolitan area. One site usually holds just 100 Comdisco employees. Now hundreds of lower Manhattan workers fill the building, with trailers set up in the back for the overflow.

 

Last year's revenues from disaster recovery came to $440 million for Comdisco, $410 million for SunGard, and $600 million for IBM. The Sept. 11 catastrophe is likely to draw even more attention to disaster planning.

 

 

World Trade Center Companies and Statistics from disaster:

 

 

Morgan Stanley estimates $500 million in computing gear was destroyed.

 

One of the banks in the building lost revenues estimated at $20 million per day, or $13,889 per minute.

 

95% or more of the companies in the buildings should fully recover their programs and data.

 

A University of Texas study found only 6% of companies that suffer catastrophic data loss without a recovery plan survive.

 

Corporations can't protect against the full extent of the loss -- including the most heartbreaking losses of Sept. 11, the deaths of employees.

 

 

Use of other existing technologies

 

 

NYC Court System: Implementing IP Phone

    The New York Court System had been experimenting with fixed wireless and voice-over-IP technology. This played a key role in its network recovery efforts. The court system lost many of its T-1 and circuits when Verizon's central office was badly damaged as a result of the attacks.

    The court system uses its data lines to connect the New York City buildings to the court houses. ISDN back-up lines brought some affected court buildings back online, but this was very slow. The biggest technical glitch was reestablishing communications for the six court buildings closest to the World Trade Center site. The buildings, connected to one another by fiber, were left with no data or voice connectivity.  Nortel equipment was used to provide an 11M bit/sec fixed wireless connection from one of the buildings to a data center farther away from the disaster site. The data center has an OC-3 link connecting it to the rest of the court system in upstate New York.

    After establishing the wireless connection, IP phones were installed in the six stranded buildings. The phones connect to a Nortel Succession Communication Server for Enterprise located in the data center. Voice-over-IP gateways in the data center and in another building upstate let callers in the buildings reach the public phone network.

 

Columbia University: Use of Internet 2 with IP Phones

    Columbia University also used IP phones to let its students make phone calls to concerned parents and friends when the public phone switches in the area were overwhelmed by calls in the hours after the attacks. Columbia resorted to Internet 2, an experimental network used to test quality of service and other advanced technologies, to carry the IP voice traffic from its campus to universities in other cities, where gateway devices routed the calls back into the public phone network.

    The first calls from Columbia over the makeshift voice network were made at 11:36 a.m. Sept. 11. Three hours later, four IP phones were available to students, faculty and staff. More phones were added throughout Wednesday. Although Columbia had no formal plans in place to set up the Internet 2 network,  it worked well and that the voice quality was good.

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