The US state of Nebraska is changing its data center usage, so an inactive disaster recovery site will be come an active standby facility, for greater efficiency and more capacity. 

The state currently has its main data center in the capitol, Lincoln, and has a contract with a data center colo provider in Omaha, 50 miles away, to provide a hot-standby disaster recovery data center. The plan is to move to an active-active configuration, through a multi-stage process.

More capacity

Nebraska CIO Ed Toner hit on the move from a traditional disaster recovery model to a more efficient active-active data center replication strategy, in a bid to shore up the state’s operational capabilities, . The move to an active-active architecture will improve efficiency and increase capacity for state’s data center operations which are currently constrained to a single data center.

The next step in the process will be to bring the data centers up in an active-active state with full, real-time replication between the two locations. When the active-active configuration is online and stable the plan is to take advantage of the higher tier capabilities of the contract data center by making it the primary site, flipping around the current configuration where the local, Lincoln data center, is primary.

With these changes made, Mr. Toner plans to build out a consolidated data infrastructure to handle the current and future needs for big data by the state.

Toner previously worked in the private sector, at First Data.