Air Guard successfully tests back-up for messaging systems

by Tech. Sgt. Melissa E. Chatham
Air National Guard Readiness Center

6/1/2010 - JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. (AFNS) -- Air National Guard members teamed up with contractors and other industry partners to create and execute a back-up system for their messaging systems.

"Until now, the survivability of (Non-classified internet protocol router) e-mail was dependent upon restoring data from backup disks and tapes," said Col. David Stickley, the director of communications for the Air National Guard. "The disaster recovery capabilities engineered, created, and now proven by the ANG Exchange 2007 Project provides the entire enterprise with unparalleled survivability. This is an Air Force first."

Air Guard members designed a back-up system to support 120,000 e-mail and 6,000 PDA users hosted in three area processing centers using the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange 2007.

Master Sgt. Aaron Correll, the manager of the disaster recovery program, provided the overall leadership for the enterprise-level IT projects and implementation teams.

He also coordinated input from National Guard Bureau leaders, the ANG Network Operation and Support Center and representatives from every involved state.

In March 2010, ANG officials consolidated its users into the new environment and tested the capabilities of the three APCs.

The disaster recovery site APC3 was created as a back-up location for 100 percent of ANG computer users. It supports Microsoft Exchange, Blackberry mobile messaging and Outlook Web Access. The other two area processing centers act as primary data centers that individually support about 50 percent of ANG users each.

APC3 enables rapid recovery of e-mail for seven days and a total of 60 days of back-up for all messaging systems.

The disaster recovery teams' goals are to recover all messaging in less than 48 hours with no more than 24 hours of data loss if a major disaster occurs at the primary data centers.

ANG officials initiated a disaster recovery operation to test APC3 capabilities. This operation transitioned all messaging hosting services for 55,063 users from APC2 to APC3 within 12 hours, less than half of the expected time.

All users continued to run at full operational capability until May 8, when they were successfully transitioned back to the primary APC. The Air Guard team immediately kicked off the operation to migrate the messaging services for these users back from APC3 to APC2.

Users began to see services restored within six hours and were at a full mission capable status in less than nine hours. All migrations were performed with zero data loss and successfully demonstrated the ability of ANG messaging environment disaster recovery capabilities.

ANG officials declared a successful disaster recovery after all 56 affected units verified service restoration. This achievement has set a new standard in disaster recovery capabilities within the Air Force, Guard officials said.