RICHLAND, Wash. - Each year, EM Richland Operations Office contractor Mission Support Alliance (MSA) performs a disaster recovery exercise to test backup measures in the event essential data center applications unexpectedly shut down or quit working.
As EM’s Hanford Site services provider, MSA is responsible for delivering and safeguarding the site’s information technology.
In its most recent exercise, MSA terminated the power on a data center to test whether critical applications of the network infrastructure, such as telephones, email, the Hanford Alerting System, and the internet, automatically rolled over to an alternative data center and kept functioning.
“Ensuring there is a seamless transition of these key services to the backup data center is crucial in keeping the day-to-day operations moving forward," said Jim Smith, MSA disaster recovery manager. “Should these systems and applications be unavailable to workers at Hanford, cleanup progress would be impacted. We want to make sure telephones continue to work, along with safety alerting systems and the intranet."
According to Smith, disaster recovery exercises ensure critical services continue to run during power outages.
“We are continually looking to improve our processes, and this exercise allowed us to confirm our recovery operations have been designed very well," he said.
In addition to testing various systems to ensure they performed as expected during the exercise, the team also revised several procedures, including finalizing a step-by-step process for getting the primary system back up and running quickly.
“EM requires MSA to conduct disaster recovery exercises on an annual basis," Smith said.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management