At 2:03 PM -0400 10/19/02, Sean Donelan wrote:
Stuff happens to everyone, its how you respond. Would your company have been able to recover as quickly?
Over one weekend I was part of a team of folks involved in moving a voice/data center for a fairly sizeable regional office across the city in Atlanta. We had pretty much everything moved, installed and working by Saturday night. Early Sunday morning as we were tidying up, someone called over the portable radios that it was 'raining in the data center!' If I remember correctly, it was a return pipe for the cooling system had come apart at a poorly soldered connection in the ceiling above the UPS. Soon enough a good portion of the floor tiles came down and the underneath the raised floor a nice pond was forming. Since it was a Sunday morning, it took some time before some building engineers could be called in to turn off building water. By that time, the 1' raised floor was pretty well full. We were on an upper floor, maybe 7 or so. I don't remember actual amount of water, but there was water draining into the third level deep parking garage below. Some servers had been permanantly damaged, but most equipment including some servers (remember NetFRAMEs?), hubs, routers, the cabling system and a PBX survived to provide service until the insurance company provided funds for everything to be replaced. Having good vendor relationships helped significantly in my experience. Many were overnighting equipment without requiring a lot of red tape. Having access to a bunch of hair dryers was also useful. :-) John