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Disaster Recovery Planning
It's All About Power
5/1/2008
In the strategic scheme of DRP, straightforward issues of power redundancy and backup often are afterthoughts. But here’s your chance to assess and plan now, before that next power interruption costs your campus dearly.
DELIVERY TRUCKS TAKE DOWN POWER POLES. Squirrels sneak into transformers. Summer heat spawns brownouts and blackouts. Power grids seize. Blizzards, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes proliferate yearly. And then, of course, there’s always construction, scheduled upgrades, and the unscheduled human error "events" that lurk everywhere. No matter the cause, when the power goes out, your data and operations are at risk.
In fact, data loss from life’s little power calamities may be the most common form of IT disaster any campus can face. According to a 2007 industry association survey, 82 percent of higher education institutions reporting a disruptive occurrence in the five years prior to the study revealed the most common event was simple electrical failure. Even a momentary outage can knock out phone service, emergency notification devices, websites, e-mail, specialty equipment, security systems, research projects, legacy hardware, and critical networks.
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Theresa Rowe, CIO at 18,000-student Oakland University near Detroit, was enjoying Christmas Eve 2006 at home when she got the call. As she describes in an industry association post, that evening a systems administrator had noticed that e-mail was no longer available. When he went to the data center to figure out what the problem was, he found the temperature over 115 degrees in the room; both air conditioning units had failed. Rowe and the facilities manager arrived to discover that some of the servers had gone into automated shutdown due to the heat. The systems administrator proceeded to shut down everything except the most essential systems. Then the small team threw open the doors to the Michigan winter, turned on the fans, and called in the contracted HVAC service provider. When the technician finally arrived, he found that the main electrical feed to the roof chillers wasn’t working. So the next call went to the university electricians, who found the circuit breaker had tripped. The breaker was reset, cooling was restored, and everybody went home around 2 am.
Still, Rowe recounts, she and the facilities manager "didn’t have a good feeling." When they returned to the data center on Christmas Day, they found that the situation had repeated itself. Eventually, the electricians figured out that the power feed to the distribution panel from the 480-volt substation had developed a fault to ground and caused the breakers to trip. A temporary fix was created by rewiring the air conditioning units to another panel.
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