Unigroup's January '97 Meeting Announcement


Topic:
Disaster Recovery Planning (What it is and Why You Need It?)

Speaker:
Martin Zam of Coopers & Lybrand

Date:
Thursday, January 16, 1997

Location:
Chase/Chemical Bank
55 Water Street, South Tower
13th Floor Conference Rooms B+C

Time:
6:00 - 6:30 PM Registration
6:45 - 7:00 PM Unigroup Business & Elections
7:00 - 9:30 PM Main Presentation


Unigroup will be holding our annual Board of Director Elections at our January '97 meeting. Unigroup members in attendance may vote for their favorite candidates for our board which consists of 13 individuals.


This month we turn our spotlight on the subject of Disaster Recovery Planning. Today's Information Technology (IT) solutions often demand fast recovery from natural disaster or major vandalism. The long term profitability, or even the survival of your business could someday depend on having a well considered disaster recovery plan in place. This session will be well grounded in real world experiences, focusing on areas where the target audience of IT professionals are likely to make the greatest impact.

Our presenter this month served as UniForum 96' Chairperson for the "Disaster Recovery Planning" discussion panel. Martin Zam is an Infrastructure Consultant with Coopers & Lybrand and has done infrastructure planning for Wall Street, the Telecommunications, the Pharmaceutical and the Shipping industries over his seventeen year career.

Today's enterprise computing infrastructures include heterogeneous mixtures of host centered systems, distributed client/server systems and personal productivity PCs. The question of how to plan for the recovery of such environments is on the mind of every IT professional.

In traditional mainframe environments, IT professionals were assisted by mature disaster recovery planning tools and ready access to expert advice. Such tools and technical expertise are not as fully developed for the open systems "client-network-server" model. This presents unique challenges to IT professionals, to plan for the business's disaster recovery needs in a new environment where the rules have been rewritten.

This session's discussion will explore engineering techniques and available technologies that can greatly enhance your chances of surviving a disaster. Subjects for discussion will include the blurring distinction between high availability and disaster recovery, remote site backup strategies, network cutover strategies and product categories that you need to be aware of.

The level of technical discussion should be mid to high level, appropriate for a target audience of IT professionals responsible for implementing and/or maintaining disaster recovery system configurations. This session will be approached in a conversational, interactive manner in an effort to promote general membership participation. Attendee participation is both welcome and encouraged.


Please join us for this meeting, you won't want to miss it!

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