VMware heads 50K network user school district data center and DR plan in hurricane country

If the Collier County Public School district IT department can trust VMware to to head its disaster recovery program in hurricane-ridden Florida, then you can probably trust it with your company’s IT and DR needs, too.

A SearchDataCenter.com coworker sent me this YouTube video in which Tom Petry of Collier County School District talks (rather quickly) about the disaster recovery realities of running a school district that has 44,000 students and 6,000 staff members “for a total of 50,000 network users” in hurricane-ridden southwest Florida.

Collier uses VMware to leverage failover sites to ensure robust business continuity — even if a rogue hurricane decides to eat the district’s data center for lunch.

In the video, you’ll get glimpses of Collier County school district’s data centers’ hardware, the generators on stand-by in case power goes down, you’ll see how VMware helps the IT department bridge the 120-mile distance between the main data center site and the failover site.