(Cedar Falls, Iowa) The term “disaster recovery” is common in the data center industry, but it took on new meaning during the Flood of 2008 for Iowa-based TEAM Technologies. The term refers to saving critical data by executing a plan which includes co-location of data with proper connectivity. TEAM Technologies, which owns a data center in Cedar Falls, Iowa, guided many businesses affected in Iowa’s recent floods through the disaster recovery process as the high water threatened storage and connectivity for companies’ data in some locations. The result; businesses, including a major health provider and utility, continued to serve their patients and customers without interruption, thanks to around-the-clock work by TEAM’s staff at the Prairie Lakes Data Center in the Cedar Falls Technology Park.

“The flood on the Cedar and other rivers quickly exceeded anyone’s worst expectations,” said Mark Kittrell, TEAM’s vice president of business development. “Our data center in Cedar Falls remained high and dry and experienced 100% uptime during the entire disaster period. We choose our sites with safeguards against disasters, including floods, in mind. TEAM’s centers continued running, while other businesses were in danger of losing valuable business uptime and technology infrastructure.” One of TEAM’s data center customers, Iowa Health System (IHS). The health care company, which operates 11 hospitals and 135 clinics in the state, stored some of its critical data in a building in downtown Cedar Rapids. IHS is careful to build redundancy into its data system by storing data in various locations. One of those locations is the TEAM data center in Cedar Falls. “We called TEAM when we knew our building in Cedar Rapids was going to flood,” said Jim Mormann, vice president and CIO at Iowa Health System. “We moved 130 servers from the basement of our office in downtown Cedar Rapids to the TEAM data center in Cedar Falls. It was quite the effort, but our servers were running again within 12 hours thanks to the staff at TEAM.” Mormann pointed out the servers moved to Cedar Falls stored information directly related to patient care. “Because of the expertise and quick work of the TEAM Technologies staff, we were able to continue to serve patients across the state,” he said. “The staff did a fabulous job, and we used them heavily to get through this disaster. Their quick work minimized the impact of the flood on our patients.”

The disaster recovery expertise at TEAM also helped Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU). The municipal utility took on six feet of water on its first floor as the Cedar River flood crested. “We exceeded our past flood records by three feet,” said Steve Bernard, Cedar Falls Utilities customer service director. “Our servers were safe on our second floor, but we had to find office space with internet and phone connectivity immediately. TEAM was a location we had identified in our disaster recovery plan for moving a portion of our operation.” CFU wound up moving the majority of its employees to the TEAM data center campus. “We had ready access to phone lines at TEAM, and our customer service lines were back on in a couple of hours,” said Bernard. “The TEAM staff also set us up with furnished office space and we started our operation.” The utility also had equipment at TEAM ready to be used in an emergency. Bernard says preplanning and TEAM’s network availability allowed CFU to connect to data stored at the utility’s main site on the second floor, so customer records could still be accessed.

Even one of TEAM’s tenants on the data center campus, Involta, which specializes in disaster recovery of data for its customers, used TEAM’s expertise. “TEAM provided fantastic service,” said Gordon Smith, Involta’s eastern Iowa sales director. “They performed exceptionally in a high stress environment. They helped Involta help our customers.”

TEAM Technologies already had an “incident response” plan in case of disaster. That plan allowed TEAM to immediately begin helping customers in danger of losing critical data. “We have an incident response plan specifically for helping our customers execute their disaster recovery plan,” said Jim Sutton, operations manager for TEAM. “We have an incident response manager and team prepared to monitor all situations as they unfold in a disaster. In this case, we were watching the weather, maintaining our data center’s connectivity and power sources, and staying on top of every customer’s individual needs.”

TEAM’s incident response included thorough communication with its own customers who were watching stories of the Iowa floods on national television. The flood was nowhere near TEAM’s data center, but the pictures prompted questions about the disaster. “Our customers could call into our conference bridge 24/7 so they could get updates on what was happening in our data center,” said Mark Kittrell. TEAM also sent blast emails to customers with details of the flooding, how the Prairie Lakes Data Center was operating normally, and how staff was constantly monitoring connectivity and power sources. “Our redundant paths for fiber connectivity and power ensured TEAM and its customers had no downtime during this disaster,” said Kittrell.