I promise this is my last non-technical post but I thought you might want an update.
There’s one thing about a voluntary evacuation you should all know. The Texas highway system is one of the best in the nation and our elected officials (including the Mayor of Houston and the Governor of Texas) are extremely bright and talented people. When they said GO, we WENT! What they didn’t say is that our highway system (including gasoline supply logistics) CANNOT possibly handle over 1 Million vehicles on five designated evacuation routes! When I posted last night, the drive time from Houston to Austin or San Antonio was estimated at 8 – 10 hours. When I got up this morning to leave it was estimated at 20 – 25 hours IF you could get enough gasoline to run your vehicle. A neighbor left at 3:00 AM and called me at 9:00 AM this morning. He had gotten exactly 18 miles, gave up and came home!
So we have decided to stay here and wait it out! We are NOT in a storm surge or flood zone area in Sugar Land and with the expected storm track to be east of us, we will be on the “clean” side of the hurricane. We are boarding up the house, backing up all the computers and stapling plastic over the inside of the windows as a precaution. The rest of our family that left early this morning have returned and we’re “hunker’n down” as they say in the south.
One technical note I do want to make: Yesterday I helped successfully implement our company’s disaster recovery plan. In my twenty-two years in this business I’ve never actually done this for REAL and the all the hours of planning, preparation and practice REALLY DO PAY OFF! All our data backups are safe (out of the Houston area), our servers, switches and firewalls are secure and protected and most of all, our employees are OK! We have Dell Computer in Austin ready and willing to assist us (these folks are awesome) with replacement servers, workstations and printers should the need arise! If you’re working in the IT field today and don’t have a disaster recovery plan at your company, DON”T HESITATE ANOTHER MINUTE! In our post 9-11 world of terrorists and hurricanes, the cost of waiting may be much more than you are willing to pay!
I made the decision yesterday to sit it out in Houston after:
1) becoming reasonably confident that the worst of the storm was going to pass by east (definitely want to be on the west side).
2) noticing that I-10 was a parking lot (I’m from a small town outside of New Orleans – am living in Houston while awaiting New Orleans to recover).
I definitely agree concerning disaster recovery. We had practiced ours with a live test last year and felt like we did really well (it was trumpteted all over the judiciary – work for federal courts). Well, after Katrina it became quickly apparent that where I had concentrated my efforts (basically internal apps) was not the concern, but having our Internet web site online was #1. So now with Rita we’re ready with that too, although I don’t expect to implement.
Another huge surprise to me (although in hindsight it shouldn’t have been) was the need to have some workstations offsite and ready to be retrieved and brought online immediately. We had our off-site servers up within a day after Katrina (and yea, that wasn’t great), but getting workstations ready to go was much slower. My attitude was always “Can buy PC’s anywhere, ” but you know the government can’t seem to move quickly on some things. So the servers were all dressed up, but had nobody to party with.
I’m rambling.
Good luck,
Kenneth Russo
I hope you guys remain safe. I’m not sure 9-11 can be blamed for hurricanes though…
How does your disaster recovery plan cover dead/missing employees?