Technological Trends That Aid the Advancement of COOP

By Barbara DePompa

Nowadays, it seems nearly every government application is expected to be available continuously without interruption, regardless of circumstances. Avoiding the potential for data loss and downtime through careful continuity of operations planning (COOP) is clearly important.

When disaster strikes, crucial operational services and technologies are expected to be available and federal organizations do place a high value on being prepared, because the practical ramifications of failing to do so can be devastating. News reports have followed organizations when they experience an interruption in services or suffer a loss of data. In these situations, constituents can lose confidence in an organization’s viability in a crisis and its ability to protect assets such as personal information, even human lives. At times, even the loss of a single service, such as e-mail or web connectivity, can cost millions of dollars.

In the last few years the advent of virtualization as well as other key technological trends including high-performance communications and storage solutions, Telework and security technologies are helping to speed recovery in both the public and private sectors. In fact, according to Michael Montecillo, principal analyst for Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo., technologies that focus on speed of recovery rather than size or terabytes of storage are increasingly prevalent. The reason, he said, “is entirely based on the use of virtualization, which can provide the ability to have a warm site or even a short term storage solution that can be of enormous help in recovery.”

Virtualization technologies can lower the cost and dependence on ‘one to one’ mirroring of data and systems for disaster recovery. Virtualization can also help consolidate multiple servers onto one or more physical systems, allowing multiple virtual machines with dissimilar operating systems to concurrently run on the same physical host system. By allowing IT organizations to ‘reuse’ older servers at disaster recovery sites, virtualization can also lower costs by reducing the need to buy new servers to comply with federal COOP regulations.

Technologically speaking, when comes to quickly collecting, compressing and transmitting data, disk-based storage solutions for backup and disaster recovery can aid in the reliable recovery of data stored on agency servers. Technologies such as de-duplication, used for compressing and moving large volumes of data, are considered extremely important for disaster recovery purposes.

Meanwhile, rising electricity costs, shrinking power supplies and mounting pressure to go ‘green’ is forcing government organizations to rethink IT strategies. And for many, server virtualization holds the key to effectively meet both COOP and green IT challenges. Having modular building blocks that can be easily isolated from other pieces of the IT infrastructure in a data center means those building blocks can be easily moved, or turned on or off, in the aftermath of a disaster.

On the downside, Montecillo said organizations must be careful about their reliance on virtualization to restore all operations, due to a lack of granularity in many of the current virtual recovery solutions available. “Some organizations may be placing too heavy a dependence on virtual recovery solutions to recover multiple applications,” he explained. “Unfortunately, if a system suffers an attack of unknown cause, the systems administrator may not want to roll back the system image just so it can be impacted once again.”

Also, without additional change management capabilities in place, an organization may lose the changes in their applications since the roll back. Instead, he explained it’s more important to understand what happened in that application to prevent a recurrence of the same kind of interruption.

The Survey Said

In an online survey of 377 federal IT managers conducted in April, CDW-G respondents saw significant opportunity gain benefits from virtualization. According to CDW-G’s survey,

73% of federal managers say virtualization is an integral component to improving IT efficiency and costs.

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In defense agencies, 78% agree

In federal civilian agencies, 78% agree

According to Andy Lausch, vice president of CDW-G’s federal business unit, one of the biggest reasons for the advancement of virtualization, according to federal IT managers was the ability to use this technology to improve COOP preparedness. “Surprisingly, only about 50% of respondents described their current virtualization implementations as successful, primarily Lausch explained, due to what he termed ‘short term’ thinking. “When it comes to virtualization and COOP, for that matter, government organizations must have a long term plan, and not chase after short term objectives to gain the greatest benefit,” he said.

Servers and Storage

Federal agencies and departments have heavily relied on storage technologies to aid in COOP protection of crucial data and applications. Mirroring and clustering of storage subsystems play crucial roles as well.  The use of server clusters within storage environments allows an organization to combine servers and RAID (redundant array of independent disks) arrays to boost computing power and overall system efficiency.


Server clusters, which appear as a single system with powerful storage capabilities, allow each server to operate independently while connecting to a common, mass storage device, usually contained in a storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) system. The advantage of this approach is that if one server fails, another takes over. Because an application or data resides on multiple servers, there’s no need to send data to a backup system when a failure takes place. All of the servers in a cluster communicate with each other through a process called polling. As a result, the operating system no longer deals with separate servers. It sees one logical system and constantly polls the servers in the cluster to determine whether they are operational. Today, clustering works under almost all major operating systems and connects to an array of devices, including those using SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) and Fibre Channel.

Telework and COOP

In a separate CDW-G Telework survey report, COOP remains stronger in the federal government than in the private sector, though additional emphasis on the need to incorporate Telework for COOP is needed. This online survey of 273 federal IT professionals was conducted in March 2008. Nearly 60% of federal employees reported they could continue to work via Telework if their office was closed due to a storm or other disaster, down significantly from the previous year, when 75% could continue working via Telework. CDW-G’s most recent survey identified IT security as having a significant impact on a government employee’s ability to Telework. More stringent IT security requirements are controlling remote network access, contributing at least temporarily to the survey’s apparent decline in employees who can continue to work offsite during an operational disruption, Lausch explained. Further, CDW-G’s Telework survey brought out that employees want greater work/life flexibility, but are still concerned that
management resistance will stunt their careers.




When asked if their agencies have a COOP plan for all employees in case of a disruption, 62% of federal IT executives said yes, 15% said no, and 23% were unsure. Of those who said yes, 31% of respondents said they know exactly what to do, while 46% said the plan is accessible to all employees, and 12% said they have never seen or been taught about the plan.

Lausch maintains the creation of a COOP plan is a critical first step for federal agencies and departments. Meanwhile, “training is also important, as all employees must know what to do in the event of an emergency,” he added.

Managed Services

Some organizations are opting to forgo in-house recovery operations and are turning over those efforts to a commercial hosting center. Even some of the newest cloud computing services provide online backup for email systems today, for example. Most hosted services operate much like a utility, offering enterprise-class service in an on-demand and usage-based model. Some COOP-related areas that are
being offloaded include:
*Data storage for on-demand storage capacity and management services;

* Data backup for 24x7 availability of mission-critical data and applications;

*Disaster recovery for hot site recovery, virtualized hot server and cold site recovery;

*Infrastructure services, for high-performance, fault-tolerant network and systems infrastructures.