Cajundome Arena

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By the time the last evacuees left in October, 2005, the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana had sheltered more than 17,000 victims of Hurricane Katrina.

For more than two months, thousands of men, women and children forced from their homes in New Orleans and surrounding areas lived on the floor of the 12,000-seat multipurpose arena while waiting for alternative housing arrangements to be finalized—a stay that far exceeded even the most dire predictions.

But while, for many, the word "shelter" conjures images of the chaos in evidence at New Orlean’s Superdome, the residents at the Cajundome were well provided for in their time of need—thanks in no small part to the efforts of Greg Davis, Cajundome’s director of operations, Ashton Langlinais, president and CEO of Wow! Technologies, and Sun Microsystems.

Langlinais’ company is the in-house technology provider for the Cajundome, and is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the arena’s impressive IT architecture—the state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment, electronic scoreboards, closed-circuit broadcasting and administrative telecommunications technology. But it goes without saying that the technology at Cajundome wasn’t designed to serve the needs of thousands of evacuees, or the government and volunteer agencies who were there to help.

Davis asked Langlinais and his team to create the IT infrastructure needed to support all of the operations at the Cajundome after Hurricane Katrina. In particular, Langlinais was asked to create an environment that would allow the dozens of school-aged children housed at the Cajundome to continue their studies during their time at the shelter.

So it was serendipity when Langlinais got word that Sun Microsystems, through the not-for-profit Sun Foundation, would donate 50 preprovisioned Sun Ray clients as desktop solutions and two Sun Fire V20z servers to support them.

The Sun Ray clients were ideally suited for deployment at the shelter, according to Langlinais. Unlike PCs, the Sun Rays feature a zero client software footprint and could be rapidly provisioned, updated and maintained from a central location in the Cajundome data center. This allowed single staff member to ensure all 50 desktops were up and running within a short time of delivery and could continue to operate without incident.

“Sun really came through for us with this deployment,” says Langlinais. “Within 30 minutes of their delivery, we plugged in the Sun Rays, set up a few tables, and had people online. We couldn’t have done that with PCs, which would have had to have been individually loaded with the appropriate software—something that could have taken days of my staff’s time to accomplish. But the Sun Rays just worked, and worked extremely well.”

They worked so well, in fact, that Langlinais began deploying them all over the Cajundome. Evacuees who needed to access government Web pages to apply for emergency benefits did so on Sun Rays. Red Cross workers who needed to communicate with other Red Cross branches to ensure delivery of critical supplies were able to e-mail their colleagues using the Sun Rays. Even National Guard troops stationed at the Cajundome used the Sun Rays to communicate with command and other units.

Which is why Langlinais intends never to go through another hurricane without them.

Following the closure of the Cajundome shelter, Langlinais was asked to contribute a chapter on technology to a Red Cross “Disaster Preparedness Guide” to serve as a blueprint for future emergency shelter operations. The Sun Rays will be prominently featured.