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Guest: Capt. Sam Sumwalt, Chief technology officer and deputy chief of staff for information technology, Navy Reserve Forces Command
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GCN IT Leadership Award winners tackled overwhelming challenges with vision, a can-do spirit and a certain prowess in harnessing technology, while also managing to inspire unusual support and solutions—often in the face of heavy resistance.
Sam Sumwalt | Continuity Planner
About the GCN IT Leadership Awards
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Moderator:
Welcome all to today's session. Our guest is Navy Capt. Sam Sumwalt, a 2007 GCN IT Leadership Award winner for his work in continuity planning for the Navy Reserve Forces Command in New Orleans. Capt. Sumwalt will be available to answer questions on continuity of operations and disaster recovery until 2 p.m. this afternoon.
Capt. Sumwalt didn’t predict Hurricane Katrina, but he did anticipate it.
Several years before the devastating storm struck the Gulf Coast, he took Federal Preparedness Circular 65 to heart and established a continuity-of-operations plan for the Navy Reserve Forces Command. As the command’s chief technology officer and deputy chief of staff for information technology, he developed long-term plans to ensure that the command’s critical applications would keep running in an emergency.
Seventy-two hours before Katrina hit, Sumwalt directed the switch of applications to a secondary production site without any downtime or loss of data.
We have a couple of questions in the queue, so let's get started.
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Roger Barnes, California, Md.: The GCN article about you mentioned you prioritized the applications and data that would require relocation during a crises. In light of what you learned, would you have set the priorities differently than you did? And why?
Capt. Sam Sumwalt: No. The priorities were established based on the Functional Owner's capability to meet Mission Requirements. The Mission Requirements are part of the organization's Strategic Plan. FPC 65 requires all Federal Government organizations to be able to recover and deliver their Mission within 12 hours. Our Strategic Plan and Functional Owners required two hours.
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Norfolk VA: What were some of the lessons learned in the quarterly tests of your continuity of operations plan?
Capt. Sam Sumwalt: The lessons were many and individually insignificant. Items were identified that were originally left off the checklists, certain remote site issues, infrastructure/program dependencies, etc. What was most significant is the confidence that developed in the system administrators and program managers. The more we practiced, the greater the confidence. When we discussed switching to the COOP site for Katrina, there was no hesitation, confusion or reluctance. We made the decision and were operating 100 percent in two hours, two days before Katrina struck Louisiana.
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Mike Rust, Washington: How are you keeping morale up in the face of ever-tightening budgets?
Capt. Sam Sumwalt: This can be very challenging. I think it is similar to how one deals with disappointment or thwarted expectations. You focus on the things you CAN control and change your attitude about the things you cannot control. There are excellent articles and books by Dr. Stephen Covey and others, but in general I try to keep folks focused in a positive fashion and do a better job than anyone else on the things they can control. We never win all budget requests. We constantly are doing more with fewer resources. I consider that part of life in government IT.
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brennan murphy:
Sam,
You've begun to take steps to ensure the availability of your critical apps in an emergency. Does this mean you are also concerned with the performance of those apps enough to measure response times before/after failover via testing? Do you monitor your apps as a service or do you folks use simple up/down device monitoring? Service monitoring provides an added layer of abstraction so that you when you're in failover, the light goes from green to yellow. If the failover site also fails, the light goes from yellow to red. To produce that, you have to monitor groups of related devices as a group. Do you have that capability? If not, how you be sure that your investments to build out availability produce the desired result?
Capt. Sam Sumwalt:
Yes, we do monitor response times for applications, both in production at the primary site and the COOP Site.
We currently track applications as Up/Down. We are executing a server consolidation plan together with one of our Navy Partners (SPAWAR Systems Center New Orleans). Part of the consolidation plan will reduce the number of physical servers to a virtualized environment. Additionally, we will have a three-way COOP capability. All data will be replicated to all three sites, with recovery servers at each site. Each site will have the ability to load-balance or be used for production when the primary site is occupied for any reason. Our goal is to achieve five nines of reliability for the mission critical applications and still have all applications recoverable within two hours.
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Robert Thomson: CAPT Sumwalt - Do you feel that the DOD will continue to mandate the use of its own facilities for DR and COOP sites or will the time come when DOD will partner with industry and use commercial facilities and infrastructure to support COG missions?
Capt. Sam Sumwalt: The Navy and DoD have contracts with commercial facilities today for both hosting and DR/COOP. The sites must be managed by the same security requirements we have within DoD/Navy. Providers who meet those criteria and able to be considered as part of our solutions. Applications and networks must meet DoD DIACAP/DITSCAP requirements as well.
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Cap Beyer Jupiter FL:
Was a real time similar to military network set up to coordinate the first responders during Katrina?
Capt. Sam Sumwalt: This is outside my responsibility as the Navy Reserve CTO, but I know from living here and speaking with folks that a good deal of effort has been made to enhance capabilities in this area. The Louisiana Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge has the lead, and we have a Navy Emergency Preparedness Officer on that team (as do the other services). State activities are coordinated by the National Guard/State Police. Many lessons were learned throughout the region during Katrina that should enhance dealing with the challenges in the future, should that be required.
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Corpus Christi, Texas: How were service level expectations during a COOP scenario by senior management addressed?
Capt. Sam Sumwalt:
We primarily utilize our Web Site as the vehicle, combined with conference calls with leadership. We always targeted the secondary site to have 75 percent capacity of the primary production site. Our tertiary site is targeted at 50 percent computing capacity.
Since much of our primary production site pre-Katrina was destroyed in Katrina, we still have primary production occurring at what was our COOP site pre-Katrina. This has pointed out the critical importance of a three-way COOP capability that is being built right now and will be our future environment.
Senior management must always have an accurate picture to make sure that mission requirements are being met.
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Moderator: That's all the time we have for today everyone. Thanks to all who submitted questions, and thanks to Capt. Sumwalt for sharing his expertise with us.
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