Page 39 - Campus Technology, October/November 2019

Brian and I then figured out a way to use NSX in a way they hadn’t thought of yet as a workaround to the way our environment was set up, so we didn’t have to take the time to change our whole network to get it right at that moment.” “There are several benefits to NSX, one being that if we needed to spin something up or make a change or push something out, especially within the data center, it makes it more manageable for me,” Massey added. During spring break in 2018, they simulated an outage and got the system back up in 45 minutes. “We use Veaam to do our backups and then copy those backups to the disaster recovery site,” Walters said. “We had Brian cut the network connection to our data center. The production servers were still online but nobody could communicate with them. We fired up the copies of backups from Veaam. NSX stretched the network from our production data center to our disaster recovery data center.” “When we brought everything back up, it went so quickly that at first we weren’t sure we had done it right,” Van Pelt recalled. “Remember, we were coming off 72 hours \[recovery time\] and with this, we were fully up and running in 45 minutes the first time we tested it. So we ran it again to make sure.” The MCC team said the project could be relevant to other schools in rural areas that have limited infrastructure for server replication and data transfer. In MCC’s case, they previously were unable to replicate their student information system over their network for backups every day, because it was too much data for the limited bandwidth available in Mohave County. With the NSX disaster recovery project, they are replicating data every 15 minutes, resulting in a server that can be brought online immediately, with no loss of data. Since completion of the project, the college has had no unplanned outages. MCC’s next step is to refine the whole process, because they believe they can get the recovery time down to 15 minutes or less. Onsite disaster recovery equipment at Mohave Community College’s main campus in Kingdom, AZ campustechnology.com 39