Early today, as part of our CITRT pre-activities, I met up with several church IT guys for dinner and a tour of our facilities at JFBC. Just before I left to to meet them at Moe’s, I saw a twitter message that they were “Geeking Out”. There was much discussion about the term “Geeking Out”, and this is what I found when I arrived at Moe’s:

I actually felt a bit left out since I left my computer back at the office. Fortunately, I did have my iPhone with me.

We had an awesome time together tonight checking out JFBC’s infrastructure and talking about IT and ministry. Looking forward to heading out in a few hours to Charleston to meet up with 60+ IT guys from churches around the country.

Matt McCook from Xirrus has offered to do a presentation on high-density WiFi and how their products can meet these needs starting at noon on July 17 at JFBC.  We have been using Xirrus products at JFBC for just over a year now and have been extremely happy with the performance and reliability of the Xirrus solution.  You can read about our initial deployment on the Xirrus Site.  I’m excited to be able to have Matt come and share their solution with other Atlanta area Church IT guys.  If you have a need for a high-density WiFi solution and would like to join us, please drop me a note at derek.schwab@jfbc.org or post a comment.

Last week, I met up with several other Church IT guys from the Atlanta area for a discussion on Information Lifecycle Management and backup with Veristor.  We raised a lot of questions and white boarded a pretty scary diagram of how data gets archived and backed up.

In the end, we determined that we need to identify a couple of key time frames:

• RPO, or Recovery Point Objective:  How much data can we afford to lose?
• RTO, or Recovery Time Objective:  How long can we wait to have our data back online?

This is going to take a lot of work from various departments, but I’ve got some initial thoughts.  First, what are our critical apps?  For us, they would be email - communication between our staff and members is critical.  Next would be our Accounting, Payroll, and Membership systems, which are all handled by the same app (Shelby).

So, how long can we be without them?  And what is reasonable given a limited budget?  As much as I’d like to say we can’t lose any data and we need to be back online 10 minutes after a disaster, that is simply not reasonably due to limited financial resources.  We probably could lose a day or so of data on the email and accounting systems and still survive.  Maybe a week on file shares and everything else.  A recovery time of 2 days for account and 1 week on everything else is probably reasonable.

I’ll be evaluating this further, as well as talking to other departments to develop some concrete objects so that we can get a better DR plan in place.

Yesterday was an incredible day. We started out at Perimeter where Tony showed me his intranet site for displaying Shelby data as well as Syncra. Jarrod Barden from Newspring Church, Errol Conner from Fellowship Technologies, and Justin Moore joined us (and probably others I’m forgetting. We did a quick tour of Perimeter, then headed over to Garrison’s for lunch.

After lunch, we headed over to First Baptist Atlanta and met up with several others. Justin did a great presentation on Asterisk. You can see his slides and calculator here. I’ll leave the transcripts to one of the guys who took really good notes.

After the Asterisk discussion, we headed over to Paetech for a discussion with some of their team as well as a switch tour. It was cool to get to see their behind the scenes operations as well as chat with some of their team.

Finally, Errol stopped by Johnson Ferry for a little while and I had the opportunity to have a great conversation with him about managing our data. I stayed at the office a while after Errol left to finish up a few things. It was a long day, but an awesome one. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get together more often?