Lugging fuel up stairs shouldn’t have been needed

While I applaud the hard work and ingenuity of the sysadmins who works through the days after hurricane Sandy to keep the generators running, one thing kept coming to my mind.  Why was this needed?

I’ve moved lots of companies into data centers before, and each time I’ve done so it has included a site visit during to RFP process to check on things like cooling, generator, site configuration, etc.  During these site visits I stick my head through every door that the sales guy and the engineer who are doing the tour will open.  If they won’t open a door for me they better have a damn good reason to not show me what’s in there.

If I went to do a site visit at a facility that was located just at sea level just a few blocks from the ocean, they’d better have some pretty impressive plans for how they are going to handle flooding.  If the answer was “we’ve never had a problem with flooding” or something similar they’d be off my list as they haven’t done their due diligence to insure that the site will be online during the worst emergencies possible.

Now before you start telling me that I’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, and that data centers in the North East have different problems from data centers in the South West.  I actually do as I’ve moved companies into data centers on both coasts.  Most recently I moved the data center for Phreesia from a managed service facility in Texas to a colo in New Jersey.  As a part of this move we looked at a number of facilities in the New York / New Jersey area.  Many of the New York City data centers were eliminated due to cost, or being just to close to the water as we didn’t want to deal with situations like this exact one.

The data center we settled on is in New Jersey about a 30-40 minute drive from the Phreesia office (once you get out of New York City).  While the data center is near a river, the river is a little over a mile away.  The data center itself is on a slope with a  cinder block wall on the outer edge which will divert water away in the event of a river overflow (it also protects the facility from someone driving a car or truck into the facility).  The generators and fuel pumps are all mounted on raised feet (not very tall, but tall enough) so that they keep running in the event of a flood.  The cables from the generators to the building have all been buried under the ground so that tree branches which are torn loose during the hurricane can’t cut those cables.

Our diligence in selecting a data center paid off.  While the folks mentioned in that article were dragging buckets of fuel up 17 floors worth of stairs the team at Phreesia just sat back and rode out the storm with their families.  The sites didn’t go down and the team didn’t have to rush into a very hazardous situation. The team was able to focus on their families and neighbors without having to worry about the systems.  Those of us that aren’t in the New York area monitored the systems remotely and founds that everything was running perfectly normally just on generator power instead of city power.

This entire event just shows that when doing data center evaluations the worst possible case situation needs to be planned for and expected.  If they aren’t they are going to come back and bite you.  Especially in todays world of storms which are ever increasing in destructive power.

If you are in a facility which has risks such as fuel pumps which are below sea level (they are in the basement and the road is at sea level) then a second data center becomes very important very quickly.  This became very clear during this hurricane when some very large important websites went offline because they didn’t have that DR facility that they could fail over to, unlike sites like StackOverflow (and ServerFault and the Stack Exchange network).

If you are at risk now is an excellent time to sit down with management and go over all the “what ifs” of your current hosting solution and think about the cost of a DR site along with the cost of not having one.

Denny

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One Response

  1. I agree with going on a site visit. I once helped a client set up a server that was supposed to be in a super high security, bleeding edge facility.  A year later, when they had problems, I travelled to help fix them up.  Found out that the server was located in a closet in the rear of an office. Light security at best with no backup AC or environmental protections.

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