City reshapes IT systems to help in rebuilding effort

04.09.2006
Hurricane Katrina struck just two weeks after Jeff Talley began running data center operations for the city of New Orleans via an outsourcing deal with Ciber Inc., his employer. On the ninth floor of City Hall, the storm's winds shook the building so hard that "you would lose your footing," said Talley, who stayed in the data center and slept on his office floor.

Afterward, the city's IT operations were a mess. Its main data center was protected inside City Hall, but problems with backup generators and universal power supplies caused numerous servers and disk drives to fail, Talley said. In addition, about 70 percent of the city's remote IT operations were in areas that were flooded. Some of the remote sites were damaged, and others were left inaccessible.

In the weeks immediately following the storm, routine IT activities, such as issuing paychecks off of the city's mainframe, became important to the survival of the municipal government. "We were afraid that if we didn't run payroll, we would lose some of the employees," said Mark Kurt, an IT manager who was named the city's chief technology officer two months ago.

Since the storm, Kurt and Talley said in a joint interview late last month, the city has been restoring as well as reshaping its IT systems.

For instance, New Orleans has consolidated many of the remote IT operations into its main data center. The city has also installed server virtualization technology on its x86-based systems in order to improve utilization rates and help support a fail-over capability to a hot site that it's setting up at a facility owned by the city of Austin.

"The hot-site concept is so critical," Talley said. "You want to try to reduce the number of people that you have here [during an emergency]. You don't want people to have to go through a Category 5 [hurricane]."