Nor’easter Complicates Superstorm Sandy Disaster Recovery
More than a week after Hurricane Sandy (aka Superstorm Sandy), my house in New York regained power on Tuesday. Contributing Managing Editor Jessica Davis and blogger CJ Arlotta also regained power. But now a Nor’easter storm (called Athena) is making life miserable again in the New York tri-state area. For MSPs, it’s the latest reminder you need off-premises backup and disaster recovery because customers’ on-premises systems continue to be hammered.
Certain areas in New York and New Jersey have been evacuated. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie warned residents that some homes and businesses that regained power will lose it again, and New York Mayor Bloomberg ordered police to use their patrol car loudspeakers to warn residents in vulnerable areas to evacuate, according to NBC New York.
This latest storm complicates a week-long disaster recovery process for MSPs that support customers in the region. All Covered, the national MSP, had more than 100 customers lose power in the region during Hurricane Sandy last week but I believe the situation is under control. And local storage companies like FalconStor have been allowing employees to leave the office at 3:00 p.m. daily. CEO Jim McNiel wants to ensure employees don’t have accidents involving downed trees or downed power lines during nighttime commutes. Some roads on Long Island remain blocked by Sandy’s destruction.
Now along comes Athena, a Nor’easter storm that has 60MPH winds and could dump six inches of snow in the area. Electricity could go out in some areas, providing yet another reminder for MSPs to investigate off-premise data recovery services that allow customers to restore their networks in the cloud. If the office network is dark or washed away, employees can still work from home or from remote locations while accessing the cloud network.
That’s the theory, at least. I wonder how many MSPs in the region will make that a reality.
We plan to, that’s for sure. And by the way, we still haven’t gotten power back, neither at home nor in the office, and we don’t expect to for some time. At this point I’m generating 5500w of AC power at the house and I’ve tied the gen to my breaker panel so the whole house is powered. And at the office we’re generating DC and inverting that to AC so we can run our onprem server farm off it. The fuel requirements are staggering and that has been rather complicated to say the least.
The thing I’ve always questioned about failover to the cloud is that you also have to fail back to your on prem systems once the event is over. Not so simple – that can take some time.
Jeffrey H: Thanks for your note. Where are you located specifically? FYI: For your fuel needs check out http://www.HessExpress.com — you can see which gas stations are open and how much fuel they have on hand. Great tool for anyone impacted by Sandy and the Nor’easter.
My kids’ school is closed today for the eight ninth straight day. Four inches of snow in my hometown and a new round of power loss for some. Crazy times. As the old saying goes: “Be prepared.”
Hope everything works out well for you.
-jp
Joe,
Hope it works out well for you too. I’ve got the same situation with school here. My daughters school opened for one day before Athena blew in and now its closed down again.
We are on the south shore of Long Island, just a few miles south of JFK.
Thanks for the tip on that Hess site.
Good luck! I enjoy the blog very much and appreciate you keeping up the fine work despite the tough circumstances. I just hope my customers can say the same about us!