San Diego-based Accelrys is fully operational after the fires ravaging Southern California forced the company to close its offices on Monday and Tuesday, BioInform has learned.
Philomena Walsh, a spokesperson for Accelrys, said that the company’s building was not affected.
Walsh said that by Wednesday, about two-thirds of Accelrys employees had resumed working, although one staff member’s home was lost to the fires.
Walsh said that in disasters such as this, the company has sound business continuity plans in place, including multiple back-up IT systems.
The University of California, San Diego, Supercomputer Center, along with the entire campus, also closed this week due to the fires.
Mark Miller, SDSC principal investigator, told BioInform that the center’s systems are fully protected for such emergencies.
“For catastrophic disasters that would take out the data center, we protect the data with limited but expanding off-site replication of critical, irreplaceable data,” he said, adding that power issues that have arisen as a result of the crisis also require protection.
He said that for more complicated systems on the allocated side, “we have elected to take them offline in the interest of maintaining data integrity and avoiding the possibility of data corruption due to power issues.”
Carlsbad-based Invitrogen voluntarily chose to close its Southern California facility early in the week, as well. The company still distributed products from the facility, maintaining a skeleton staff.