It's All About Power

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Disaster Recovery Planning

It's All About Power

5/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

New Backup Concern: Power Over Ethernet

North Carolina’s Central Piedmont Community College, with six campuses and enrollment of about 35,000, is outfitted with 88 redundant UPS units and 16 diesel (including some biodiesel) generators, all in place to keep services running during the occasional outage.

CIO Malik Rahman believes the good working relationship his IT organization has with the campus facilities organization is key to its power management success. "For any new [building] design, IT people work with end users to make sure technology needs are met and, at the same time, we work with Facilities [to define] the standards that need to be followed for wiring closets for any technologies we have on campus."

The wiring closets are a particular concern for Piedmont technologists, because the school is deep into a data convergence project with Nortel to upgrade the network within and among its six campus sites. That project includes the upgrade of the infrastructure from 1 to 10 gigabit Ethernet, as well as the implementation of voice over IP (VoIP). Currently, about a third of handsets are VoIP, with the remainder migrating as the school installs new switches with power over Ethernet (PoE).

"The key selling point of traditional telephony was the dial tone available every time the handset was picked up," says Rahman. "When we move to VoIP, we have to provide the same level of availability. Otherwise, it’s like a step backward." That requirement necessitated a level of reliability in every closet housing switches for PoE, so the campus brought in an outside engineering firm to evaluate all of the IT power requirements and study the campus emergency power generation capability. Rahman and his team quickly concluded that there were certain areas where emergency generators did need to be bumped up in size, although 90 percent of all "new" construction (completed in the previous decade) had sufficient emergency power available.

Happily, the growing pervasiveness of Ethernet-powered communications has simplified Rahman’s job of justifying funding requests for emergency power. "The network carries network data and VoIP but also carries our surveillance system video and building control systems," he explains. "Because of that, [the power backup upgrades] become a lifesafety issue. For that reason, the college has invested in emergency power availability in these closets."

Although the campus hasn’t experienced an unplanned outage of its data equipment in a "long, long time," Rahman’s team still has a shutdown process in place as part of its disaster recovery plan, which gets tested annually. The development of that process, he says, has required IT to prepare a catalog of services for tech staff, in the rudimentary stages at this time. That catalog records details of service: "Which server is this running on? Which server is the backup server? How critical is it? What is the population that will be impacted if the server is down? Which other services are either dependent on this service, or is this service dependent on?"

Still, even redundant systems can expose weak areas. In the case of Piedmont, says Rahman, its points of weakness are mainly human. A couple of years ago, he recalls, an electrician from the facilities operation walked into one of the data centers and pushed a red button, "which brought down all of our servers simultaneously." Since then, he says, IT has imposed stringent controls on entry into the data centers.