Time for a random (sort of) dream post around disaster recovery. This post is aimed at those companies that see themselves as preppers. It’s not for the individual home owner this is for the business that wants to avoid a dooms day scenario.
Many companies have disaster recovery (DR) plans in place they may even have a co-lo site that the replicate their servers to. Here’s a thought to take it to the level of a Doomsday Prepper. I’m sure you’ve seen the TV show’s on Discovery Channel and Nat. Geo. These shows document people who are preparing for a major natural disaster to strike.
One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is buy a missile base. My mother was a historian back in my home town and was the first person to publish an article about Ed Peden and his 20th Century Castle in the Flint Hills Independent many years ago. Since then Ed has been selling missile bases. You can check out his site here: http://www.missilebases.com/
This evening one of my friends sent me an email saying they saw Ed on Doomsday Preppers on Nat. Geo. So I figured it would be a good time to type this up and share it with ya’ll.
So what’s this crazy idea? Simple, buy a missile base or communication bunker here in Kansas and put your DR site in something designed to withstand a nuclear missile. There are several cool things about this idea.
First cool thing is the cooling. Because the facility is mostly buried, the temperature stays at a much cooler than most other sites you will find. This means you get to save on cooling costs.
Next there are communication lines to these sites. Many of them have good communication lines running right up to the building. It’s not going to be that hard to drop an OC24 line into one of these sites so you have all the speed you need.
Another great thing about these sites is limited access and great physical security. This is especially true for anyone dealing with information that needs to be secure. With a several ton front door I don’t think anyone is going to just jimmy the door, walk in, and take something.
All of this is great but here’s the other cool thing (besides having a decommissioned missile base) is you can have plenty of room for your knowledge workers to go to in the event of a disaster. You could take this even further with virtualization.
If you use VDI and all of your servers are virtual… you’ve got instant recovery. All you have to do is get out your zero clients and run your SRM fail over plan. Once you do that everything is ready to go.
You can take something like this and even expand on it. You could offer the co-lo and let other companies replicate to you. If you really wanted you could turn the site into a training/conference center. Then have the ability to practice full blown DR plans.
That’s my crazy off the wall idea for this evening. So now your company can be a Doomsday Prepper too.
Cheers,
Tony
1 comments
This is cool!