Backup and Recovery

Disaster Recovery Site

CSU, Fullerton has established a Business Continuity computing site at San Francisco State University.  The site allows a number of critical computing functions to remain in service in the event of severe infrastructure disruption, such as complete failure of both CENIC links to the Internet, failure of the network core on the Fullerton campus, or complete shutdown of the Fullerton Data Center.

The goal of the site is to provide continuity for the most critical computing services that can be supported in a cost-effective manner.  Complete duplication of every central computing resource on the Fullerton campus is prohibitively expensive, and San Francisco State’s Data Center could not provide the space for that much equipment.  (The same is true for SFSU.  Fullerton does not have the space, cooling, or electrical to duplicate all the equipment at SFSU.)

Major capabilities include continuity of access to:

• The main campus website: www.fullerton.edu
• The faculty/student Portal: my.fullerton.edu
• Faculty/staff email;
• Student email (provided by Google, but accessed via the Fullerton Portal)
• CMS HR, Finance, and Student applications (hosted by Unisys in Salt Lake City, but accessed via the Fullerton Portal)
• Brass Ring H.R. recruitment system (hosted by Brass Ring)
• OfficeMax ordering system
• GE Capital state procurement card system

The project began with initial discussions between the CIO’s of Fullerton and San Francisco in 2006, where they agreed in concept to provide limited “hosting” for equipment from the other campus.  An arrangement was worked out with CENIC, the statewide data network provider, to use features of the “Border Gateway Protocol” to allow a campus to switch a portion of the campus Internet Protocol (IP) space from their main campus to the remote campus in a matter of seconds.  This capability was perfected and tested in the summer of 2007.

A major innovation was the use of the “backup” CENIC link at SFSU to provide Internet access for Fullerton’s remote site.  This completely avoids Fullerton having any impact on the SFSU network.  We use none of the SF IP addresses at SF.  They make no changes to their firewall or routers.  We need no network ports.  And, all Internet traffic to our site goes through the backup CENIC link, not through SFSU’s primary link.

Fullerton purchased an entire cabinet of equipment, including firewall, network switch, servers, and remote management of keyboards and power plugs.  The equipment was tested locally and transported to San Francisco in January, 2008.

The site became operational in February, 2008.

 

Redundant site

Information Technology is planning to improve the campus already redundant campus network by moving one of the Cenic internet links to another area on campus. Along with this Cenic link IT will also move the minimum necessary network and server equipment to allow the campus network to run with minimal to no down time to all network users on campus in the event of any planned or unplanned outage in the University Data Center.

Major capabilities include continuity of access to:

• Campus backup Cenic internet link
• Campus network routers
• Campus domain controllers
• Campus DNS (Domain Name System) service
• Campus firewalls

This project is still in the planning stages.

Server Backup

All production servers in data center are backed up using multiple programs based on their backup needs. From multiple backup in a single day to weekly backups as required. All backups are then copied to tape libraries and these tapes are sent off site to be used in the event of a major disaster or recovery of any data as required or an approved request.

Major capabilities include:

• Encrypted backup tapes
• offsite and onsite backup of systems
• Perminante storage of archived records
• Secondary location off campus data stored in a secure location