Inside AT&T’s National Disaster Recovery Bunker: Who AT&T Calls When The Death Star Explodes
When the World Trade Center collapsed, it took out a critical AT&T switch, crippling service. It was restored in 52 hours – including the time to drive a caravan of 18-wheelers from Atlanta to a lot in Jersey City.
It’s hot and muggy like it usually is in Georgia at the end of July. There’s no air conditioning in this warehouse, a concrete desert with a tin roof, lit by strips of undying fluorescent lights and streaks of the sun flooding in from the open bay doors in the back. A single industrial-sized fan is blowing, almost like someone’s idea of a practical joke. It’s a vast industrial space that feels utterly empty, even with dozens of 18-wheelers lined up, a convoy waiting for a calamity. The only signs that humans work here are a basketball hoop and a climbing rope.
This nondescript warehouse, in an even more nondescript town outside of Atlanta, is home to AT&T’s National Disaster Recovery program, one of six depots scattered around the country. When an AT&T central office or other piece of critical networking infrastructure is wiped off the face of the earth, NDR is what makes shit work again.
See Inside AT&T’s National Disaster Recovery Bunker: Who AT&T Calls When The Death Star Explodes, by Matt Buchanan.
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An unexercised contingency plan could be worse than no plan at all!
Be sure to read Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan, Philip Jan Rothstein, FBCI, Editor – the only book on this subject – for valuable tips, techniques and insights. Now only $49.00!
Tags: At&T, communications, National Disaster Recovery, NDR, telecom
