Fergie's Tech Blog

UPS Working To Retore Networks Felled By Katrina

Laurie Sullivan writes in InformationWeek:

UPS Inc. is still working to restore telecommunications at several shipping and receiving facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi more than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina.

UPS' meteorological team had been tracking Katrina since before it hit land and was able to plan shutdowns at its package-sorting facilities in the storm's path. Still, primary data networks failed at 53 sites across Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Thirty-one of those locations also lost their backup networks.

Data that UPS employees and customers use to track package status and deliveries depend on those networks. "If these locations can't send or receive data, we and our customers don't have visibility into the delivery status of packages," says Jim Medeiros, VP of Shared Services at UPS. "We first needed to reestablish communications, and we've done this with all but four sites that have power."

Information on shipments for every UPS package is stored in databases at a Mahwah, N.J., facility, which is backed-up by a second data center outside Atlanta. Besides allowing UPS to track packages, the databases allow for rerouting as necessary. But the value of those databases is limited if the information stored in them isn't continually updated from facilities across the country.

posted by Fergie @ 9/12/2005 03:23:00 PM