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> From: David Somers > last time I wrote a paper on disaster recovery I scared > the crap out of the managers with all the scenarios I came up > with they > didn't dare show it to the clients (e.g. they forgot that > when your data > lines get severed - not uncommon when the builders are > digging up the road > outside your office - that having a separate lines coming in over a > different physical route suddenly doesn't sound so stupid. Sounds familiar. I did some work for a major UK retailer in 1998; their entire credit card handling system was at that point on a bank of modems calling in to their data centre. One day a digger took out all 100+ lines to the data centre. Suddenly all 800+ stores were on manual auth for the cards. This is not a good way to win friends and influence people. The centre now has two comms racks at opposite ends of the main room, two bundles of lines going out of opposite corners of the building, opposite ways down the road, to two different exchanges. Because of the centre's positioning, one exchange was at that time fed from BT's main East (UK) coast trunk, the other from the West coast. The DR team reckoned this was probably safe enough, short of establishing a reserve at their second datacentre 200 miles away. - Peter