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UNIGROUP OF NEW YORK JANUARY 2003 ANNOUNCEMENTS
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1. UNIGROUP'S JANUARY 2003 GENERAL MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT
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When: Thursday, January 16th, 2003
Where: The Chase Manhattan Bank
One Chase Manhattan Plaza (1CMP) <==(Our New Location!)
Conference Center, 28th Floor
Downtown, NYC
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YOU MUST RSVP TO GET PAST SECURITY, SEE BELOW!
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Time: 6:15 PM - 6:30 PM Registration
6:30 PM - 6:40 PM Ask the Wizard,
Questions, Answers and Current Events
6:40 PM - 6:50 PM Unigroup Business
6:50 PM - 9:30 PM Main Presentation
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Topic: IT Disaster Recovery - "Running a Winning Relay Race"
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Speaker: Sharon M. Williams, CBCP,
Continuity Solution Engineer,
Hewlett Packard Business Continuity Recovery Services
(HP BCRS)
Introduction:
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First off... Happy New Year!
That being said, its that time again... its time for the annual
election of the Unigroup Board of Directors... and the annual
call for Unigroup members (or other volunteers) who would like
to serve on the board (or simply help the board) and take care
of Unigroup.
Unigroup members are welcome to volunteer to serve on the Board
of Directors of Unigroup of New York, Inc. Please Email the
board at @unigroup.org> if you are interested in
getting on the election ballot. The Unigroup Board holds a
board meeting typically once per month (currently at a
convenient Midtown NYC location), and performs other tasks
via Email and Telephone. The Board plans, prepares for, and
runs the meetings, finds speakers and giveaways for the
meetings, and performs other tasks which keep the group alive
and funded. Unigroup is a volunteer not-for-profit educational
organization and we need your help!
Now, back on topic... particularly this month's meeting topic...
IT Disaster Recovery. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
have always been important topics, but they have taken on new
meaning given the catastrophic events of recent years (eg.
wide-scale power disruptions, floods, earthquakes, tornados,
hurricanes and terror).
I spoke with our speaker at length last week. To summarize,
all I can say is that I expect that most people in attendance
will leave the meeting saying "Wow, Fantastic Meeting!"
You can easily see from the meeting outline and from our
speaker's biography, that we are in for a real "master class"
session. This meeting will address the issues of Disaster
Planning and Prevention (from a Technical and Business Impact
point of view), as well as the various issues related to
Business Continuity and Post-Disaster Recovery.
Unigroup would like to especially thank our speaker for flying
in for this meeting. Unigroup appreciates HP's continued
support.
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SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS:
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* IN ORDER TO PASS THROUGH SECURITY AT CHASE, WE NEED YOU TO RSVP
* PRIOR TO THE MEETING DAY, SO WE CAN GET YOUR NAME ON THE ATTENDEE
* LIST. ADVANCE REGISTRATION AND PHOTO ID ARE REQUIRED!
* RSVP DEADLINE 15-JAN-2003 16:00. <<<< PAY ATTENTION, DEADLINE!
* Keep an eye out on the deadline date and time, as it may change.
Please RSVP if you know you are attending or if you think you may
be attending. This will help us arrange for a letter to security
for all of Unigroup. It will also help us to determine the correct
amount of food and refreshments.
To REGISTER for this event, please RSVP by:
a) If at all possible, please use the Unigroup Registration Page:
http://www.unigroup.org/unigroup-rsvp.html
This will allow us to have some automation in the RSVP process.
b) If you must Email us, send an EMail containing the FIRST and
LAST NAMEs of the persons attending to the Unigroup RSVP
address:
unigroup-rsvp@unigroup.org
The Email subject should start with "RSVP".
You may optionally include your contact phone number (that
day) or other current information.
DO NOT simply reply to this email, sending us back the entire
announcement (we already have it); leaving the subject as it
was, and NOT containing the phrase "RSVP" as requested. In
that case, your message just looks like failed mail and it
makes it impossible to automate the RSVP process and get
you registered for our event.
ALSO: Do NOT give us an email address which is over quota
and cannot receive any new email. This causes us to receive
bounces from your address when we send out the RSVP-ACKs.
You must have a working and valid email address in order
to get on the Unigroup Meeting Attendee List which will
grant you access to our meetings. Be sure to proof-read
your email address before submitting the RSVP request.
Please continue to check the Unigroup web site:
http://www.unigroup.org
for any last minute updates concerning this meeting. Please
check your email for any last minute announcements prior to the
meeting. Note that only the Attendee First and Last Names will
be provided to Chase Security.
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Description of Talk:
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No matter how big or how small your business may be, it is critical
to understand the steps on how to:
- Respond to an outage.
- Recover from an outage.
- Restore normal production.
- Resume normal production, moving from the disaster site
back to restored production.
In this presentation we will discuss why 60% of all businesses
fail to meet their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point
Objective (RPO) because of missed steps or lack of ownership while
responding to an outage. How do we determine what level of an
event has occurred and who takes ownership of declaring a disaster?
How do you invoke the right relay teams necessary to recover
critical components before loss occurs to your reputation and
revenue? We will answer these questions, plus address additional
questions that deal directly with responding and escalating during
an unplanned outage.
Once your relay teams are in place, how do you recover?
- Who goes first?
- What gets recovered?
- What are your RTO and RPO windows for each critical component?
- Who gets the baton next?
- What does the rest of the team do while they are waiting?
- How do you communicate during the disaster?
- How do you and your team escalate issues and problems during
recovery?
- Where do you get more resources and who helps you?
These and many more questions are essential for identifying the
correct recovery methods and steps to recover your critical
components during a declared disaster. We will discuss how to get
the right level of recovery plan in place for your critical IT
components. We will address:
- Who in the business owns identifying the RTO and RPO windows
for each critical component?
- Based on RTOs and RPOs, what type of strategies should be
implemented?
- How have strategies changed today verses yesterday?
- How much is too much to spend on recovery and how much is
too little to spend?
- How do you get management buy-in and a budget to implement
the correct recovery strategy that meets the RPO and RTO
for each critical component?
- How do you get an IT plan documented and visual enough to
make it understandable without all the blah blah blah?
- How can you ensure the plan is invoke-able?
- How do you keep the plan a living document?
Once we address response and recovery, we will briefly discuss the
necessity of restoring your production site and resumption steps
that migrate you back to your restored production site from your
alternate processing or recovery site.
So, with all said and done, what can really happen that would
cause an outage resulting in a declared disaster? We will discuss
events of the last 10 years and explore declared disasters with
both successful recovery and not so successful recovery. We will
share war stories and have an open discussion on issues today.
We will discuss what we learned from September 11th that has
driven changes in our recovery strategies.
Web Resources:
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HP http://www.hp.com
HP BCRS http://www.hp.com/hps/tech/continuity/
HP Services http://www.hp.com/hps/hpc/i_business.htm
Giveaways:
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To-Be-Announced (HP is investigating what they can put together).
Speaker Biography:
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Sharon M. Williams, Continuity Solution Engineer
HP, Business Recovery Services
Sharon is an experienced leader in Business Continuity practices
across the United States since 1978. She has extensive experience
in all aspects of recovery that include risk assessment, business
impact analysis, strategy development, crisis management, disaster
recovery planning, and business continuity planning. Her major
focus over the last 15 years has been IT Continuity Planning and
paying special attention to the never-ending changes in IT
infrastructures and components. She draws on more than 25 years
of Information Technology related experience to support clients
of various major businesses.
As a Continuity Solution Engineer for Hewlett-Packard, she is
responsible for ensuring customer recovery plans and recovery
components are invoke-able. She specializes in IT continuity
and rehearsal management, focusing on IT staff processes and the
steps necessary to recover within the correct recovery time
objective for each critical IT component.
Over the years, Sharon has assisted many businesses and
organizations in North America, Asia/Pacific Rim and Europe in
understanding business continuity concepts. These concepts
include risks and threats, determining recovery and continuity
strategies, and developing plans to anticipate any outage that
would impact the businesses reputation and revenue. She has
managed over 100 recoveries due to major and catastrophic outages
for North American clients.
Her IT recovery experience includes network recovery, various
system platforms such as IBM, Unix, MPE, NT etc., critical IT
infrastructure components such as print servers and batch servers
along with applications and database recovery, including SAP,
Oracle, Informix, etc.
Education:
BA Education: Western Montana State University, UC Berkeley.
CIS Education: American River College, Sierra College.
Certifications and Awards:
Certified Business Continuity Professional,
Disaster Recovery Institute.
Certified Novell Engineer,
Novell.
System & Advanced Management,
Hewlett-Packard.
Windows Application Specialist,
Micro Soft.
Financial Management Achievement Awarded,
U.S. Department of Energy.
Area Manager's Ward 1993,
U.S. Department of Energy.
Company Biography:
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The "New" HP. See for information about HP.
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Fee Schedule:
Yearly Membership (includes all meetings): $ 50.00
* Non-Member Single Meeting: $ 20.00
Student Yearly Membership: $ 20.00
Non-Member Student Single Meeting (with ID): $ 5.00
Payment Methods: Cash, Check, American Express.
* Employees of JPM/Chase (with ID) can attend general
meetings at NO CHARGE.
==> Unigroup is the Greater NYC Regional Area Affiliate
of UniForum - an International Unix Users Group.
Our Joint Membership Program with UniForum is currently
on hold due to circumstances at UniForum. For information
about UniForum visit http://www.uniforum.org.
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Complimentary Food and Refreshments will be served. This includes
sandwiches such as turkey, roast beef, chicken, tuna and grilled
eggplant. Chase also provides us a very nice spread of treats,
which include brownies, cookies, popcorn, bottled water and
assorted beverages.
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Directions:
The 1CMP building is situated: South of Liberty Street, North
of Pine Street, East of Broad/Nassau Street and West of William
Street. The building is one block east of Broadway, right
behind 140 Broadway.
The closest entrance to the conference center is from Nassau
Street, first elevator bank from the Nassau Street entrance.
The building is on a raised platform. Walk up the outside
stairs at Nassau Street and head for the guard's station at the
south-west corner of the building. Tell the guards you are
heading for Unigroup.
They will inspect your ID and carry-ins and direct you to the
meeting facility assuming you are on the Unigroup RSVP list.
Once you get upstairs, enter the conference facility through
its main doors. There is a bank of large monitors to the left
of the entrance which should direct you to the Unigroup meeting
room (the room may vary from month to month). To the right of
the main entrance is the concierge's desk, ask for help there
if you need anything. The conference facility has two levels,
keep in mind that the Unigroup meeting may be up the staircase
on its upper level. Thus far, our meeting room has been
upstairs, on the south side of the building.
As always, also look out for Unigroup signs marking the path
to the meeting room. Also note, if you come early, we may not
have our own signs in place yet (we have to commute there too).
Transit By Train: Take the J/M/Z to Broad Street and walk one
block North to Pine St. Take the 4/5 to Wall Street and walk
North to Pine St., then East to Broad St. Take the 2/3 to Wall
Street, the North West exit is inside the Chase complex, else
you will need to walk a block North and West. See the MTA
Downtown NYC Map (pdf) for detailed mass transit information:
http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/maps/mapdown.pdf
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Please mark this meeting on your calendar and join us!
Please tell your friends about Unigroup!
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2. UPCOMING MEETINGS
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We have a series of meetings in the works:
- True64/HPUX/Linux Futures
- Zope and Python (Web Page Development)
- Unix Clusters and Clustered Databases
- High Performance Internet Servers / Web Acceleration
- Unix 30th Birthday Celebration
- IPsec and IPv6
- Linux Clustering Part 3: Beowulf version 2
- Building a Firewall using FreeBSD and Linux
- Unix Office Tools: Word Processors, Spreadsheets, Accounting Packages.
- Emacs
- Tex
- PKI
- GNU Development Environments
- Meetings on a variety of Sun/Solaris/Java topics
Please let us know about any other meeting topics that you may be
interested in. Potential speakers on Unix related technology topics
should contact the Unigroup board at uniboard@unigroup.org.
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3. PRIOR MEETING
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Unigroup would like to thank our speaker Carl Sayres and his colleagues
from Data Representations for his
talk on "Building Integrated Front-end to Back-end Wireless Applications
Using Java Technology". We learned about current standards influencing
Java development as well as specific APIs useful for communicating with
Hand-held and Wireless Devices. Small demo programs were interactively
created using their development environment, and they were compiled and
executed in real time. The environment supported concurrent client
and server-side emulation, allowing for easier debugging.
Data Representations provided some nice giveaways- we had raffled off
three live copies of their wireless application development software.
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4. UPCOMING TRADE SHOWS
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The following trade show will come to the Javits Center this month.
For show information and complimentary exhibits-only registration,
visit their web page:
LinuxWorld Conference & Expo
http://www.linuxworldexpo.com
Exhibit Hall Hours:
Wed, January 22, 2003 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Thu, January 23, 2003 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Fri, January 24, 2003 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
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5. UNIGROUP INFORMATION
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Unigroup is one of the oldest and largest Unix User's Groups serving
the Greater New York City Regional Area since the early 1980s. Unigroup
is a not-for-profit, vendor-neutral and member funded volunteer
organization. Unigroup holds regular and special event meetings
throughout the year on technical topics relating to Unix and the Unix
User Community. Unigroup is also the Greater NYC Regional Area Affiliate
of UniForum - an International Unix Users Group.
Thanks to Chase, Unigroup holds regular meetings planned for the Third
THURSDAY of Odd Months at The Chase Manhattan Bank, 1CMP, NYC.
Chase has been a long time sponsor of Unigroup, allowing us the use of
a meeting room and presentation equipment.
Planned meeting dates are: 1/16/2003, 3/20/2003, 5/15/2003,...
Watch for our Special Event meetings at the various trade shows in NYC
as well as "field trips" to the facilities of local hardware and
software vendors.
=========================================================================
= For Unigroup Information, Events and Meeting Announcements be sure to =
= visit our World Wide Web Home Page: =
= http://www.unigroup.org =
=========================================================================
For further information or to get on the Unigroup Electronic Mail Mailing
List send an EMail message to:
unilist@unigroup.org
To contact the Board of Directors of Unigroup, send an EMail message to:
uniboard@unigroup.org
To contact the Newsletter Editor, send an EMail message to:
editor@unigroup.org
If you have recently attended a meeting and you are not receiving
Email announcements, please send us an Email and we will make
corrections to our lists.
Please Email the Board with any suggestions, especially potential
meeting topics and speakers. Unigroup welcomes contributions and
content suggestions for our newsletter. Unigroup is a volunteer
organization and we need your assistance! Please let us know if you
can help!
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I hope to see you all at our next meeting!
-Rob Weiner
Unigroup Executive Director
unilist@unigroup.org
http://www.unigroup.org
[Unigroup Home]