This IT pilot fish works in New York City for a company that has a disaster recovery "people site" across the Hudson River in Jersey City, along with a DR computer site in Newark, a few miles away.
"The equipment had supposedly all been moved from Jersey City and reinstalled in Newark," says fish. "When I arrived on the scene, we barely had any communications between the three sites -- and we needed those for possible remote work, data backups, remote DR system monitoring and the like.
"And very little worked. And nothing had been tested. And the systems I needed turned out to still be in a server room in Jersey City that we had supposedly evacuated months before.
"And no one really cared. Officially, the vendor had already set up their external comms to Newark, and was ready to order a new server set -- in a few months. Followed months later by a team to go set it up. Then finally begin testing.
"Instead, a senior engineer and I met in the Jersey City site, boxed up the servers and carted them down to his car, jammed it full, headed to Newark and reassembled them. Some follow-up was needed. but we had partial access that same day, and everything up within a couple weeks rather than several months.
"When DR testing took place a bit later, everyone was shocked to find my systems were the bulk of what was up and running!"
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