In the late summer of 2017, Hurricane Irma blew into Florida. Just days within the storm’s predicted touchdown in the heart of the Tampa Bay area, FieldCore’s production systems lay in its path.

“We weren’t prepared for it,” said Kerry “KJ” Johnson, senior systems engineer at FieldCore Service Solutions LLC, a General Electric company that delivers field service for customers in the power generation, oil and gas, nuclear, and wind power markets. “The problem was, had the storm hit us, and we had to then throw over and go live at our [disaster recovery] facility in Atlanta because Tampa was down — we wouldn’t have any way to have backups during that time that we were live.”

Johnson received a phone call from his directors asking what could be done in less than three days to prevent disaster.

Johnson and Ruya Atac-Barrett, vice president of marketing, data protection, at Dell EMC, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed how FieldCore averted potential disaster as Hurricane Irma approached its operations. (* Disclosure below.)

Planning for the worst

To prevent disaster as the hurricane approached, Johnson phoned a Dell EMC representative, who offered a solution: FieldCore could use virtual appliances since it had not rolled out its DR equipment yet. “I got my resources together, and we put a plan together. And we actually had the project started by the end of that first day. Just another day at the factory,” Johnson said.

By Thursday evening, all the data had been replicated, and Johnson’s teams were able to hunker down before the storm took over. While the storm was only a Category 1, had it hit as a Category 3, FieldCore would have been in a lot of trouble had they not been able to replicate the data in time.

As it turns out, more of Dell EMC’s customers are now focused on disaster recovery and cybersecurity than ever before, according to Atac-Barrett. A recent survey Dell EMC compiled of 4,000 companies in 16 countries found that information technology transformation companies are protecting data across distributed environments, public cloud, hybrid cloud, physical, virtual and automation for virtual machines.

“There’s this massive amount of data outside of the data center,” she explained. “It’s becoming more and more critical. I think sometimes people think of us as infrastructure, but our data protection capabilities are just as robust.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE