All Posts Tagged With: "Problems"
Today we are going to look at how fire detection systems can be used in Data Centers to prevent catastrophic loss and damage; we will focus on Very Early Smoke Detection Systems, (VESDA – Very Early Smoke Detection Alarm).
Without an efficient and safe environment, there is no way to be assured of business continuity. To [...]
One of the strangest things about IT people is that they often miss the obvious until it is explained to them (sometimes with the aid of a hammer). We are all so used to following the rules and doing what everyone else does. This particularly applies to IT Operations, also known as the Command Centre [...]
Continue ReadingThe Daily Mail reports that a UK Government investigation was launched after the personally identifiable information (PII) of more than a million bank customers was found on a computer sold on eBay.
Highly sensitive information on American Express, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland customers was found on the disk array sold for £35.88 (about $72).
The [...]
Continue ReadingA neat photograph of a set of gas cylinders containing Inergen that are used as part of a data center fire suppression system.
Recently I had an unplanned gas discharge at one of my data centers in the north of England. $140,000 of lost gas and a real pain.
Lesson learnt is don’t allow trucks to park [...]
It’s not a new phenomenon, Sun did it over a decade ago with the 4500 range of servers that vent hot air left to right rather than front to back but it doesn’t make it any easier to run a complex site when major vendors like Cisco continue to insist on breaking the front to back [...]
Continue ReadingIf, like most of us, you use a diesel generator as a backup power source during electrical outages, you need to understand something about Data Center engines and how to keep them running sweetly, starting automatically and reliably. It is horribly career limiting to spend your shareholders money on some equipment that you only need once every [...]
Continue ReadingA week ago I wrote a glowing report of the technology behind the Mosso Hosting Cloud and how it was high capacity and fault tolerant. Well, I had a MySQL database outage today causing The Hot Aisle to go off the air for a few minutes.
Very poor show, lets see what Mosso and Rackspace have [...]
Zinc whiskers, although a catastrophic problem, are not new (they were discovered in 1948 by Bell Labs). They grow on many zinc coated components and structures commonly used in Data Centers. Zinc coating is used to slow the rusting of steel components. There are two types of zinc coating, Hot Dipped Galvanized (HDG) or electroplated. Only one [...]
Continue ReadingHere is the acid test - our customers often know that there is a service problem before we do. When that happens, as far as our customers are concerned, we suck, we are incompetent and they are smarter than us. Our IT Operations team may be publishing loads of great Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that show improvements [...]
Continue ReadingSimultaneously the most powerful aspect of and the biggest problem with IT Systems are that they are flexible by design. They are so flexible that that many of our people want to show how smart they are by being helpful and adding value. Unfortunately, being helpful is one of these things that inevitably leads to unintended [...]
Continue ReadingYou might think that your data center is under the spotlight, constantly monitored, secure and well designed but what if I told you that typically the second most common cause of catastrophic failures (after electrical) in your Data Center are water leaks?
Water can come from three main sources:
Leaks inside the Data Center from refrigeration equipment [...]
Continue ReadingWay, way back in the stone age (whilst I was a student) I worked in the Edinburgh University Computer Labs keeping all of the hardware going. I had got a report of a DEC PDP 9 (drop me a mail if you know what one of these is) that kept restarting every few days all [...]
Continue ReadingWe all worry about failures in our data centers, some types of failure more than others. Losing a server is bad, losing a storage array extremely bad! How then might we categorize a full power failure in a data centre? Catastrophic certainly, even careless perhaps?
I can hear the questions already:
How could I have a full [...]
The consequences of data center failure can be pretty catastrophic for your business, so unsurprisingly, you will have very high expectations about availability and reliability. Unfortunately for many of us, our expectations will not be met by reality. Very often the system that is our data center facility is significantly less reliable than we might [...]
Continue ReadingThe thing about data centers is just how much power they use. This one in Cardiff, Wales uses about 20MW of power and has huge strings of batteries storing power to drive the UPS units. The batteries are kept in dedicated battery rooms that are air conditioned to keep the cells cool and maintain a [...]
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