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Security Books Media Book Reviews Technology

Planning for Survivable Networks 115

Posted by timothy from the last-node-standing dept.
Priscilla Oppenheimer writes "Annlee A. Hines' book Planning for Survivable Networks, is quite a page-turner. Yes, that's surprising for a technical book, but I found it to be true. I was fascinated by the stories of real companies (Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street Journal, and others) that survived the 9/11 attack and resumed business quickly. There are also stories from other disasters, both man-made and natural, and information on companies that were not able to quickly resume business. The author summarizes the stories with explanations of what went right and what went wrong, with advice on developing your own disaster recovery plan." Read on for the rest of her review.
Planning for Survivable Networks
author Annlee A. Hines
pages 320
publisher Wiley Publishing, Inc.
rating 10
reviewer Priscilla Oppenheimer
ISBN 047123284X
summary Designing networks that can recover from natural and unnatural disasters

As Hines explains, Lehman Brothers had headquarters in Tower 1, as well as in 1,2,3 World Financial Center (across the street from the WTC towers). Lehman moved to a backup recovery location and performed cash-management functions the same day as the attack. The company was online trading fixed-income securities by the next day. They had 400 traders online when the NYSE reopened Monday, 9/17.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published the story of its own recovery and Hines used that as source material for her book. WSJ had an extensive disaster recovery plan, based on lessons learned in the 1990 power blackouts in New York. After the blackouts and a subsequent fire in the emergency generator room, WSJ decided that it would never again depend on just one location being operational. WSJ opened other offices that could perform some of the necessary tasks to bring out a paper. Geographical diversity of resources seems to be a key to success.

When the 9/11 terrorists attacked the buildings across the street from WSJ's main offices, senior managers called for an evacuation, knowing that they could still produce the paper. The Wall Street Journal managed to publish a full newspaper with eyewitness accounts of the tragedy the next day.

Hines' writing is easy to follow. Although she delves into some technical details, with the requisite IP and TCP header depictions that you will find in so many networking books, the book can easily be read by managers and business people. Planning for Survivable Networks has many factual tidbits about disasters of all sorts, and although these are interesting, the primary benefit of reading the book is to gain an understanding of the characteristics of companies that sustained business after a disaster compared to companies that did not.

As Hines says, the companies that survived disasters all had disaster recovery plans in place. The plans were activated by decisive managers, who also promptly got their people out of harm's way. (If people don't survive, it won't matter much if systems survive.) Another point she makes is that the managers had to be adaptable. Not everything went according to plan, and it shouldn't be expected that it will.

The book opens with the author being rocked by a terrorist-caused explosion herself. She wasn't present for the 9/11 attackers. Rather, the bombing she survived occurred at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, 20 years before. A retired Air Force officer, she has dealt with threats all over the world for many years. Her direct command and control experience has taught her many lesson, which she shares with the reader in Planning for Survivable Networks.

Probably one of the most useful chapters, Chapter 11, "The Business Case," offers advice on presenting to management a case for a network continuity plan. According to the back cover, Hines has taught economics at a community college, and I would say that experience helped her explain the many costs involved in having a disaster recovery plan, including fixed, variable, direct, and indirect costs. She also explains the expected value of having a plan and how to sell that to management.

I recommend this book as an informative discussion of how companies can ensure business and technology continuity in a world with hackers, terrorists, natural disasters, and human error. It's a practical book, but also a surprisingly uplifting book, considering its technical content. I truly enjoyed reading about the adaptable human spirit that enabled managers and workers to keep their businesses going after the 9/11 attacks.

You can purchase the Planning for Survivable Networks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Planning for Survivable Networks

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  • The irony (Score:5, Funny)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday June 12, 2003 @12:53PM (#6183086) Journal
    of this book being on /. is enormous.

    My book on this subject is one page long.

    Page 1: Don't let Slashdot link to you.

    • from the article:

      "probably one of the most useful chapters, chapter 11, "the business case," offers advice on presenting to management a case for..."

      in light of the current economy, i find this particular chapter arrangement particularly funny.

      ed
    • Er.. how about:

      Don't put up dynamicly generated content without adding protections that automatically replace dynamic content with updated-once-per-minute static content when traffic becomes prohibatively high.

    • Re:The irony (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      <?php
      if (preg_match ("/slashdot.org/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
      exit;
      }
      ?>

      • Re:The irony (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Lennie ( 16154 )
        This sounds like a bit of a time-critical section. :-) You shouldn't be using a perl-compatible regular expression for that (quietly slow string comparison) or if you do, you should make it fast:
        "/^http:\/\/slashdot.org/"
        (starts with), but best is ofcourse:
        if (strtolower(substr ($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], 0, 16)) == 'http://slashdot.org') {
        exit ();
        }
        Well, just for completeness.

  • I’m planning on dying in the disaster… (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    â¦as I would prefer death to running a network these days.

  • What a stupid idea (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Disaster recovery" is the biggest load of shit. If I had been a 9/11 survivor, the LAST thing on my mind would have been getting my projects back on track!

    People need to get their damned priorities straight. If you lose your job because you'd rather spend time with family or just enjoy life, so be it. Jobs can be replaced. Time cannot.

  • No mention of slashdot in the book? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Prince_Ali ( 614163 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @12:59PM (#6183157) Journal
    Why didn't they mention the survival of slashdot in the face of countless disasters. The great troll strike of 2002 comes to mind! The revival of beowulf jokes, the lawsuit from Nat Portman and the hot grits famine that followed were all destructive but /. survived. Slashdot is able to survive just about any disaster whether in Soviet Russia or at home, and for that it should be commended!

  • Worst Chapter Name Ever (Score:5, Funny)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:00PM (#6183181) Journal
    Chapter 11, "The Business Case"

    Seems like that chapter is required reading these days.

    • Unless your business is directly producing I.T. services then chances are that I.T. is a cost center and not a profit center so expensive things in it will always need to be justified, but many businesses are so reliant on their infrastructure that they cannot function without it. If that is the case then the numbers should be aparant and the business case should be easy to make if you have taken any business classes. If you haven't then there is probably a reason that you are not an I.T. manager.

  • other survival books... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:02PM (#6183203)
    "Surviving Slashdot" by Oliver Clozoff

    "Surviving Slashdot" Illstrates how to build a corporate network that accepts large numbers of incoming connections from stories posted at Slashdot.org [slashdot.org], while still allowing employees to make network connections that they need. Techniques covered include round-robin DNS with different servers in different geographical locations, multiple HTTP servers with load balancing, and smooth transition over to a volume web host. like Conxion [conxion.com] or cNet [cnet.com] at a moment's notice without significant downtime. Other Anti-Slashdotting tactics also discussed.

  • What about a natural outbreak scenario? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zptdooda ( 28851 ) * <deanpjm@gm a i l . com> on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:06PM (#6183239) Journal
    "Planning for Survivable Networks has many factual tidbits about disasters of all sorts..."

    I wonder if that's included.

    When SARS hit earlier this year our disaster recovery planning team was faced with a situation they hadnâ(TM)t anticipated: potential quarantining of large numbers of staff with critical business-continuity functions.

    The building and computer systems would be physically secure, but staff would not allowed into the workplace.

    So there was a scramble to survey everyoneâ(TM)s job function and set up broadband and VPN access from home if needed.
    • IS your organization large enough to consider putting together a group that could stay isolated for some time. Ie, they don't have contact with other people and the outside world for a considerable length of time, hence don't need to be quarantined?
    • There are a whole range of things that can go wrong with networks, and part of Business Continuity Planning is being paranoid about the right problems. Too many East Coast companies got surprised by 9/11 - here on the West Coast we have buildings fall over every decade or so, though fortunately the loss of life has been kept low by good building technology. You do have to spend a lot of time looking at what your critical resources are, including your people, your computers, your data, your telecomm netwo

  • Lehman Brothers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gorbachev ( 512743 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:09PM (#6183284) Homepage
    Their trading floor might've been up in no time, but speaking as someone who worked with the Lehman Brothers in WTC on 9/11, I can say some of their other divisions weren't as lucky.

    The team I was on lost 2 months worth of work, because it wasn't backed up on a remote site. The version control servers were at WTC.

    If it wasn't for a single developer, who had made an unauthorized copy of the project on a floppy, we would've lost much more than just 2 months.

    Proletariat of the world, unite to kill terrorism

  • Rammstein bombing (Score:4, Funny)

    by chiph ( 523845 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:10PM (#6183292)
    Rather, the bombing she survived occurred at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, 20 years before.

    I happened to be at Rammstein the day after the bombing mentioned. The transmission from the car got blown over the top of a four-story building (other parts didn't quite make it through the building). Quite a powerful bomb that killed and hurt many people. I think it eventually got pinned on the Red Army Faction.

    The fun part was I was returning a Siemens teletype to the maintenance depot there, and the other guy in the VW pickup with me had forgotten his military ID (he had left it in his field jacket back at our base). So here we are pulling up to the main gate with this huge wooden crate in the back, and only one of us has any ID. We were lucky they didn't strip search us on the spot.

    Chip H.

  • our current plan in full (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    if it can't be recovered from the on-site week+ old backup, then we close the doors (if the doors are still there) and file for chapter (7, 11, 13, whatever the lawyer suggests)

  • take a page from a bank (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) * <treboreel@live.com> on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:20PM (#6183407) Journal
    They are the best prepared for a disaster, by the virtue of being required to be open on the fourth day. Ever since the stock market crash, banks have exactly 3 day to recover from ANY disaster and open the doors or the federal government will step in and take over. The fines for failing to uphold any of the fed reg's is ENORMOUS. Both BofA and WellsFargo have used their plans successfully in the past. BofA in both SF during the quake, and in LA during the riots, and Welss Fargo's main headquarters burned. A good Contingency Operations Program is VERY EXPENSIVE, and requires many things beyond the obvious. Do your sales people have all their numbers in a rolodex on their desk, will they be able to function without it ?

  • Disaster recovery, what 911 taught me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:25PM (#6183449)
    Run down on what I learned from 9-11.
    Were constantly under attack on some front, hey I knew this in my Marine corps days, some attacks are just worse than others.

    What YOU should have learned from 9-11.
    Dont take life for granted, your a freaking SysAdmin, A programmer, a Techie or god forbid some kind of manager that can be replaced. Work when your at work, back shit up and when you leave work, leave work, dont take it with you if your gone tomorrow, someone will notice, in a week there will be a new face in the crowd to replace you.
    You never really know when your gonna be part of some F-ed up shit that is going to happen. Go surfing, get a Girlfriend, get a life outside of work.

    The most important disaster you should be planning for is your own, is this mentioned in the book?

  • Who cares ? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    corporations don't spend on disaster recovery anymore. They blew it on Y2K, its been all down-hill since.

    disgruntled IT schlub.

    "would you like fries with that ?"

  • But whatever you do, (Score:5, Funny)

    by EvanED ( 569694 ) <evaned@NOspAM.gmail.com> on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:39PM (#6183586)
    ...when disaster strikes, don't forget your towel.

  • Disaster Recovery != Survivable Network (Score:4, Informative)

    by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @01:50PM (#6183694)

    The Survivable Network Technology [cmu.edu] program at the Software Engineering Institute (part of Carnegie Mellon University) describes in detail what "survivable network" actually means. The author [of the book in the /. review] seems to have missed some key points. Nutshell version: a survivable network keeps going despite disasters, etc; moving to a different network to continue business does not mean you have a survivable network.

    In fact, a quick google on "survivable network" turns up several hits (on the first page) from the SEI.

    (Disclaimer: I used to work at the SEI, but in a different area.)
    • The editor probably thought "Survivable Network" had a more sexy yet ambiguous (profitable) connotation then "Survivable IT Infrastructure". My $.02.
    • Nutshell version: a survivable network keeps going despite disasters, etc; moving to a different network to continue business does not mean you have a survivable network.

      What if it's cheaper to move your functions to a new network than maintain the old one after a disaster? Ie, if the new network appears exactly the same to the user as the old network did, then the network has "survived" whether or not it is the same network as before.

      • "What if it's cheaper to move your functions to a new network than maintain the old one after a disaster? Ie, if the new network appears exactly the same to the user as the old network did, then the network has "survived" whether or not it is the same network as before."

        "This is the axe of my ancestors. Sometimes the head wears out and has to be replaced. Sometimes the handle wears out and has to be replaced. But this is the axe of my ancestors."

  • Price (Score:3, Informative)

    by jdehnert ( 84375 ) * <jdehnert@@@dehnert...com> on Thursday June 12, 2003 @02:23PM (#6184038) Homepage
    $40 at Barnes and Noble [barnesandnoble.com]
    $28 at Amazon [amazon.com]

  • Error-proof networks != Attack-proof networks (Score:3, Informative)

    by rfischer ( 95276 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @02:33PM (#6184136)
    There was an interesting article in Nature a while back... said that networks like the Internet, which are very tolerant of faults in links and nodes, are not so tolerant of intentional attacks on nodes with high connectivity.

    here's the ref. for the curious:
    Albert A, Jeong H, Barabasi AL, Error and attack tolerance of complex networks Nature 406:378-382, 2000
    • Ross Anderson [cam.ac.uk], professor at Cambridge University has some works on this including Programming Satan's Computer (PDF) [cam.ac.uk] which looks at cryptographic protocols being attacked by being deployed on hostile system. Such as Satellite TV decoders which rely on smartcards which are in the posession of the attacker / customer.

      The Tamper Lab [cam.ac.uk] is pretty impressive too.

      Making your system realible in the present of the hostile attacker or on a hostile system is very hard, well nearly impossible.
  • have interviewed the slashdot crew on how they handled there system when everybody in the world was hitting them during 9/11. Sure, its a secondary effect of the actually event, but some news agencies SAs could use this for future events.
  • Thanks to VERITAS Software's NetBackup http://www.veritas.com may companies were saved in the Towers coming down.
    • Has anyone out there tested the Disaster Recovery options of Veritas/Arcserve/Legato etc. in an MS environment? (no sneers please)

      I'm kind of skeptical of them. It seems that you need the open files agent (costing $$$) on all your servers in addition to the D/R option. Even that may not be enough to work, since you will likely be restoring to different hardware than the one that was destroyed. (unless you get lucky on Ebay)

      The only other option that I can see would be to image the hard drives with Ima

      • Use Veritas to back up all of your data (databases etc.) to tapes. Back up the OSs/applications using sysprep. Sysprep is quite useful for transferring a server to different hardware. Ghost is what I use to copy my sysprep images.

  • Lehman Brothers Headquaters (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dvk ( 118711 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @05:10PM (#6185579) Homepage
    #1: OK, small nitpick: Lehman's HQ was in WFC3, NOT in WTC1. However, it did have presence in all 4 buildings mentioned.

    #2: While thoretically Lehman was migrated more-or-less OK (we did have off-site backups, backup datacenter, etc...), in practice the only thing that saved them was the working-to-death of IT people in the next week.

    Many of backups were made on the same-site servers. Restores were difficult, obviously. (read: almost impossible in some cases).

    Many servers didn't have decent failover h/w in the backup datacenter. Hint: the datacenter was increased by over 100% in 4 days, based on my visual estimates while carrying servers up there).

    FYI, I was "blessed" with starting off with a 24-hour shift, and then pulling 12-hour night shifts for over a week. Considering the fact that 9/12/01 was my 1-month wedding anniversary and that both Mrs. and myself were in WTC1 when the plane flew into it, one can see how I was a bit upset at the management, ESPECIALLY since my own application failed over with no problems - i'd rather have spent more time with her.
    What did I get for all that effort? Yay! A plaque, with an image of WTC. Nice gesture, Mr. CEO! :(

    -DVK
  • Try my disaster preparation page for sys/netadmins at this [ecis.com] page.

    It's more oriented towards small businesses and ISPs without the resources to build complete backup sites a few thousand miles away.

  • A few things to keep in mind about Disaster Plans (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dolemite_the_Wiz ( 618862 ) on Friday June 13, 2003 @05:20AM (#6189120) Journal
    1) Just because you have a disaster plan doesn't put your company in the clear. You've got to put it into action and make sure that this plan will be ready to go at a moment's notice.

    2) You've got to test the plan/Backups pierodically.

    3) During 9/11 in NYC, the only portable communication devices that worked in the Twin Towers were Blackberry devices.

    4) A Remote, out of state, location for a backup datacenter is a good thing.

    5) If you need justification for Management for putting together a disaster plan, say this "Which will cost more, putting together a Disaster Plan or repairing a companies reputation as a result for not having one?

    Dolemite
    _______________________

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