The picture at right is of the flooded ground floor of Verizon headquarters at 140 West St. in lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy blew through the Northeast [1] last year, All Things D reports.
For a few weeks last year, communicating was a real challenge in the storm zone. Power was out. Networks were stretched to the limit, in part because of a surge in demand, but also because a lot of the underlying equipment required to run them was offline or damaged.
When you’re in charge of managing digital infrastructure, planning for natural disasters is kind of a big deal. Businesses that rely on key systems in order to continue operating have to think long and hard about all the variables. Usually it involves building up a separate site to fall back on when the primary one can’t operate normally.
Then there’s that moment when the switchover, technically known as a reprovisioning, actually happens. Ideally it’s the sort of thing that requires days to carry out. The problem is the people doing the work usually get a few hours.
So IBM said today that it had come up with a way to make that switchover happen a lot faster. Working with some students at Marist College [2] in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Big Blue said, it demonstrated a way to use software-defined networking to accelerate the process of reprovisioning so that it takes only minutes.
Read more [3]