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ETS team provides failover capability for critical department systems

ITD's critical information technology systems have new backup capability because of a group effort by Enterprise Technology Services staff members during January's three-day weekend.

In case of emergency, ITD now has the capability to "failover," or switch, systems located at the department to back-up systems located at the State Controller's Office.

"Last weekend (Jan. 18-20), we tested failover for e-mail, file servers, SharePoint, storage and several other IT management systems that would be needed to restore service in case of an emergency," said Shannon Barnes, ETS administrator.

"ETS met a major milestone as part of our ongoing effort to ensure continuity of operations (COOP) for some of our critical IT communications and management systems," she explained.

Phase two of the work will involve setting up COOP capabilities for the department's Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system. Completing that work will take place over the President's Day weekend (Feb. 15-17).

"This project was kind of like buying insurance," Barnes said. "You hate paying for it and spending all of the time preparing for it, until you need it."

"This is a really big deal for us and something we have been working on for two years," she added.

Barnes credited Joel Drake and Dave Tolman for helping turn the idea into a project and Roland Williams, project manager, for guiding ETS technical staff through completing the project.

ETS staff that worked on the project included Bryan Smith, James Tayler, Hugh Massie, Bill Finke, Greg Christiansen, Brian Reed, Dave Fulton, Cameron Lowe, Brandon Carter and Chuck Carroll.