Degussa Corporation's office and manufacturing facility on the Alabama coast of the Gulf of Mexico houses vital information systems and support for 1,400 users at warehouses and business offices throughout North America. Maintaining these mission-critical operations is essential to the company's ability to generate billions in sales annually.

The location of Degussa's Alabama facility lies in the path where hurricanes often travel across the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean. The company required a reliable contingency plan to ensure that its business is not interrupted despite the threat of natural disaster at this key site.

Working with IBM Global Services, Degussa-Hul's operations and technology staff created a business continuity plan based on IBM's Business Continuity and Recovery Services methodology. The plan details the steps needed to create a fully duplicate system at IBM's business recovery center in New York State. The duplicate system would contain all of Degussa's mission-critical information and applications.

IBM provided a range of products and services to Degussa, including:

• AS/400 server hardware to run core business applications
• RS/6000 servers used in imaging and document management
• IBM 3995 Optical Library storage system.

When Hurricane Georges barreled across the Gulf of Mexico in September 1998, it packed 150-mile-an-hour winds and deadly walls of water. With Degussa's Alabama facility directly in the storm's path, Joe Gowder, director of operations and technology, issued a disaster declaration 36 hours before the hurricane was expected to hit the area. At the IBM Global Services business recovery center, professionals readied tape systems with capacity for 300 gigabytes of data for Degussa's North American operations.

Gowder supervised a complete backup of Degussa's business information and personally delivered the media to IBM. The IBM team quickly duplicated Degussa's systems and prepared them to go live if the company's Alabama facility was shut down.

The worst effects of Hurricane Georges bypassed the Degussa site by 40 miles. Gowder never had to make the decision to move operations to the backup system. "We were glad we didn't have to take the final step of switching our end users over," says Gowder. "But if we had, the backup system was ready and our users throughout North America would not have known the difference."

To be effective, any contingency plan must enable Degussa-Huls to quickly prepare for the loss of vital systems and information so its business data remains available to users. The plan must protect all aspects of the company's business processes, including financial systems and custom applications. It also must provide the skilled people and reliable resources to execute it with confidence.

IBM helped us in a number of ways, including setting up test environments, providing the infrastructure planning and maintaining records associated with the outcome of tests so we could make continual improvements to our systems, Gowder said. "IBM Global Services also provides basic services such as the pre-loading of tapes, which saves us a lot of time -- time that saves a lot of wear and tear on my group of eight people."