Few network administrators have ever had to go through a disaster on the scale of the deadly Northridge Earthquake that devastated Southern California in January of 1994: "The key lesson is do not put all your eggs in one basket".
California State University, Northridge (CSUN) was virtually at the epicenter of the quake and the university is still feeling the effects five years later. More than 200 temporary trailers still dot the campus, substituting classroom space and administrative offices that were damaged or destroyed and remain unusable.

For the CSUN IT staff, the quake provided a wakeup call that demonstrated the inadequacy of its disaster recovery plans. When the quake hit, CSUN was operating with a centralized backup policy utilizing IBM 3480 tapes with backup operation performed at the university data center. The disaster recovery plan was based on storing backup tapes off-site from the data center, but only at another building on campus. The earthquake exposed the problems with that plan, particularly when the building storing the tapes collapsed, according to Marc Montemorra, Senior Networks and Systems Analyst at the university. Recovering the critically needed 3480 tapes was further complicated, said Montemorra when it was discovered that the collapsed building was loaded with asbestos, making it off limits to the IT staff.

"The key lesson was don't keep all your eggs in one basket," said Montemorra, who still has his office located in one of the temporary trailers. After learning that lesson the hard way but surviving one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history, CSUN has of necessity moved to a more distributed backup model with server-based backups implemented at a department level. One of the first steps toward the new backup model was the deployment of a Tandberg Data Model 1440 automated tape library. The library, based on Tandberg's SLR50 drive technology, provides a compressed capacity of 2 terabytes with data rates of up to almost 58 gigabytes per hour.

CSUN' s Tandberg library is connected to a Dell 6100 Pentium Pro server running Windows NT. In addition to backing up server data, the Model 1440 library is also used to secure data stored on user workstations connected to the university's Ethernet LAN. The CSUN installation uses CA/Cheyenne ARCserve Enterprise Edition to perform daily differential and weekly full backups of the Dell server as well as a diverse mix of user platforms including Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Mac OS, and Windows 95/98 and NT workstations.

To provide an additional layer of data protection, CSUN is planning to implement data mirroring between campus sites over a wide area synchronous fibre optic network. That network is part of a Very High Performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) connecting California universities.

CSUN selected the Tandberg Data automated library solution after extensive research, including evaluating DLT, DDS and 8mm options, said Montemorra. Tandberg Data's SLR50 technology won out based on three key factors: cost, reliability and simplicity of design. "Cost was a big factor," said Montemorra. "The other solutions were almost twice as expensive". Montemorra was also impressed with the elegant design of the SLR50 drives, which contain a small fraction of the number of the moving parts used in rotating head helical scan devices - such as DAT and 8mm - and employ a much gentler tape handling design which does not require the tape to be extracted from the cartridge and exposed to external contaminants.

To date the Tandberg library has lived up to the university's reliability requirements with no problems at all. "It's been very stable; it's built like a tank," said Montemorra. After the experience of being at ground zero of a 7.0 earthquake, Montemorra said the university has learned its lessons and with the rollout of the SLR50 based backup strategy, CSUN will be better prepared if it ever again is faced with a disaster of similar scale.