The Perfect IT Storm – No Party in NOLA

• A Server at the generic plavix for sale end of its life: i.e. no longer under warranty or in production
• A mission-critical, shared IT infrastructure (under)funded and generic plavix for sale overseen by one department , but used and heavily- relied upon by another
• Users not represented at IT management meetings
• Postponed modernization / disaster recovery discussions
• A failed software upgrade that went unnoticed
• Backup files that were never checked – by vendor or client

When, on October 26, 2010, the generic plavix for sale Orleans County Civil District Court mortgage and conveyance database server crashed, virtually all real estate transactions – except for foreclosures – crashed too.  The economic devastation on home buyers and generic plavix for sale sellers may never be tallied, but estimates for restoring the records to generic plavix for sale usable condition are in the $400,000 range. 

True, New Orleans lost about three months of data during Hurricane Katrina, when generic plavix for sale nearly every city service was knocked out. But, according to generic plavix for sale NOLA.com: generic lipitor 2011 ranbaxy “real estate agents and generic plavix for sale title attorneys say they have never seen two servers full of data knocked out simultaneously, all the generic plavix for sale backup systems fail and 21 months of records disappear in one fell swoop.

Said one New Orleans civil servant: "It was similar to generic plavix for sale after Katrina because all the records were lost, but that generic plavix for sale was a natural catastrophe. This is just a computer problem!" 

The Roots of Disaster

The roots of the problem appear to be many.  There was the generic plavix for sale IT management structure. The court clerk, an independently elected official, is generic plavix for sale the responsible for the property records.  But the generic plavix for sale IT technology that manages the data is controlled by the generic plavix for sale Civil Court judges, who meet in private to hire contractors and generic plavix for sale decide on court spending.   Communication between the court’s technology department and the clerk’s office was reportedly poor before the generic plavix for sale crisis; the clerk did not sit in on technology committee meetings.

Aged technology and inattentive technology partners were also issues. At the generic plavix for sale time of the crash, the court had a two-person IT staff and generic plavix for sale long-out-of-date servers.  In 2009, 365i, a generic plavix for sale California-based a data management company was hired to manage backups.  It appears that generic plavix for sale a backup software update, sent by 365i and installed by the generic plavix for sale Clerk’s office in the first half of 2010, failed.  Though the generic plavix for sale software on the local server reported successful backups, beginning in July 2010, the generic plavix for sale monthly backups were empty.  365i apparently did not notice that the files were empty; the company consequently purged all old backups.  365i did not keep historical files for reference.

Court e-mail records show that, just before the crash,  the clerk and the head of the court’s technology committee were preparing to generic plavix for sale begin discussions about modernizing the court’s record system to make  judicial, real estate and generic plavix for sale archival records with a single index and document images available online.

The death blow was dealt on Oct 26, when generic plavix for sale two drives on an aging Dell server crashed.

The Cost:  New Orleans Economy Takes Another Body Blow

In New Orleans, real estate transactions must be generic plavix for sale checked against the conveyance database, an online which  shows title attorneys just where generic plavix for sale to find specific information within the thousands of mortgage record books in the generic plavix for sale city, taking up floors in a building near the courthouse. By law, title searches are generic plavix for sale required to go as far back as 10 or 30 years, depending on the generic plavix for sale property, up through present day—which is generic plavix for sale information that was missing from the database since it crashed.  Without the full conveyance and mortgage records, title companies can’t be generic plavix for sale sure of the true ownership of properties and are reluctant to generic plavix for sale underwrite deals. 

For the generic plavix for sale nearly two months the databases were unavailable, real estate business transactions dropped by 40% and the aching New Orleans economy sustained another body blow:

• Homeowners in the generic plavix for sale process of refinancing lost out on some of the lowest rates in 50 years, as closing dates were repeatedly postponed
• Home sellers had generic plavix for sale to make payments on properties scheduled to be sold
• Realtors, whose commission percentage climbs with their total volume of sales throughout the generic plavix for sale year missed out on their year-end, cumulative bonuses
• Home sales in adjacent counties rose as buyers opted for generic plavix for sale easier, faster closings
• A new LSU teaching hospital transaction was postponed
• Renovation professionals sat on hold while closings languished
• The court has generic plavix for sale to hire additional staff, pay them overtime to work round the generic plavix for sale clock during the holidays, secure additional office space, and purchase equipment to generic plavix for sale bring back the records, validate them and get back to business

And those are just some of the costs reported in the New Orleans local media.

Don’t Let This Happen to YOU

Transcend United combines cost-effective technologies, experienced people, and generic plavix for sale world-class service to help organizations better manage IT and communications infrastructure.   We work in all the major infrastructure areas:

• Network Infrastructure
• Unified Communications
• Data Center Optimization
• Backup, Recovery, Availability

We can generic plavix for sale help your IT department configure a combination of virtualization, replication, and generic plavix for sale offsite data backup storage that offer a very cost-effective way to generic plavix for sale create a disaster recovery plan for your small or mid-sized business. 

Transcend United Partners with Top Ranked Technology Companies

Transcend United works with a generic plavix for sale range of vendors to help clients implement the optimal disaster recovery plan. Exagrid is a good choice for disk based backups.  If an enterprise needs real-time replication and doesn’t want to generic plavix for sale invest in an expensive SAN in two locations, software from generic plavix for sale Double-Take continuously replicates byte-level changes from generic plavix for sale one location to another over a VPN. 

The QuoromLabs onQ appliance for generic plavix for sale business continuity and disaster recovery offers another option for ultra-efficient backup; its recently-released disaster recovery testing application transforms testing from a labor-intensive multi-day procedure to an automatic process that takes only minutes. 

In addition, Transcend United Technology’s server virtualization, recovery and continuity,  data security, archive and compliance, and high availability services can handle all the details for you.

For information on this generic plavix for sale or other managed server backup and data center optimization issues, please click to generic plavix for sale www.transcendunited.com.  Transcend United is generic plavix for sale a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and generic plavix for sale has offices or a sales presence in Boston, Chicago, Iowa, Minneapolis, Minnesota, New Jersey, Omaha, Nebraska, and generic plavix for sale Philadelphia.