So…the weekend of the big scheduled maintenance comes around and you get to the office and start getting yourself mentally prepared for the day.\u00a0 As if simply being away from your family for a beautiful Saturday isn’t enough, you walk into your “secure” computer room only to find an intern sleeping behind one of your racks. Your initial reaction is to scream, holler and kick him out.\u00a0 But, you figure out that you may get some information out of him if you hold your temper.\u00a0 After some teeth-gritting questioning, you find out that all the interns have been passing around an access card key they found more than six months ago.\u00a0 There hasn’t been any issues arise because of their napping. No harm, ho foul, right? NOT!!!\u00a0 This is a nightmare…not to mention an accident waiting to happen.\u00a0 Data centers are no place for the untrained.\u00a0 There are many thousands of dollars worth of equipment, some top-heavy racks and sensitive network components all over the place.\u00a0 Oh…and don’t forget that just a few months ago, you successfully passed an audit certifying your data center as secure. Depending on the environment (banking, health care, intelligence, etc.) this breach could be devastating.\u00a0 So…the only thing you can really do is to kill all of your access cards (you thought I was going to say interns, didn\u2019t you?) and reissue new ones to only those who need access.\u00a0 What a pain!<\/p>\n
After this fiasco has been taken care of, you are now doing some of your maintenance, when you smell the unmistakable aroma of frying electrons.\u00a0 Follow your nose…it always knows. You arrive at an old server with smoke billowing out of it.\u00a0 Now what?\u00a0 Am I ever going to be able to get to the reason I came?\u00a0 It turns out that this server is so old that it actually caught fire.\u00a0 I know…you would have decommissioned that server years ago; but there are some interns that have been using it for some reason or another and their manager wanted to keep it on hand. Interns…can’t live with them, can’t shoot them.\u00a0 So, you remove power from it and pull it out of the mix.\u00a0 The power supply fried in a bad way.\u00a0 I know it doesn’t happen very often…but it does happen; I’ve seen it myself.\u00a0 So…you finish cleaning up after the billowing smoke and get ready to start your maintenance, when it occurs to you that the fire suppression system didn’t go off like it should have. GREAT!!!\u00a0 Why did that happen?\u00a0 Now you have to investigate why it isn’t working properly.\u00a0 Upon close inspection, you notice that the last time it was maintained was four years ago.\u00a0 “Man…how did that slip my mind?”\u00a0 Now you’ve got to get someone out there to fix it.\u00a0 Do you wait until Monday, when it’s going to be cheaper, or do you pay weekend premium to get them out here today? Decisions, decisions, decisions.<\/p>\n
I’ll wait until Monday…I really need to get this maintenance done, now that an hour of my maintenance window is gone.\u00a0 Wait a minute…what is that noise? Can it be? Yes…that’s the tornado siren.\u00a0 What? The weather man didn’t predict severe storms today.\u00a0 As you pull up the radar on your phone, you see that there is, indeed a tornado close by.\u00a0 So, you head down into the basement of your building hoping that nothing goes wrong.\u00a0 And, your wish is granted.\u00a0 The tornado was a small one and disappeared without any issues.\u00a0 But, your building took a direct hit from lightning and you are now on UPS because your generator didn’t kick on for whatever reason.\u00a0 Can this day get any worse?\u00a0 So, you trudge down the hill toward your generator getting soaked because it’s still raining. Whose idea was it to put the generator so far away, anyway?\u00a0 Fortunately, when you get there, you are able to get it started right away. It’s a good thing that you just happened to be on site when the power went out.\u00a0 After getting dried off a bit, in the freezing cold computer room, you make the dreaded phone call to the generator people, because you can’t go without that.\u00a0 They’ll be there in four hours or less.\u00a0 My experience is that they’ll be there in four hours.\u00a0 Good thing you had plans to be at work all day on your day off.<\/p>\n
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to simply run in and do your maintenance without having to worry about people sleeping in your computer room, the fire system not working correctly, or losing power?\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t it be great if somebody other than you worried about the security and protection of your data center?\u00a0 Oh, and what if that tornado even came close to your building?\u00a0 Do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that your data center would be fine?\u00a0 Move your equipment to a third-party data center where they have the security in place; where they have the power protection and generation in place; where there is a tornado proof building protecting your IT investment.\u00a0 And\u2026you won\u2019t have to go to the CFO and try to explain why you need a new badge access system; or a new fire suppression system; or a new generator or switching gear.<\/p>\n
This wraps up our series on why you should move to a third-party data center instead of trying to create one on your own.\u00a0 I hope that we have been able to at least provide you with enough information to accurately assess whether or not this is an option for you.\u00a0 Keep checking in as we discuss more data center topics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Physical Security & Protection So…the weekend of the big scheduled maintenance comes around and you get to the office and start getting yourself mentally prepared for the day.\u00a0 As if simply being away from your family for a beautiful Saturday isn’t enough, you walk into your “secure” computer room only to find an intern sleeping<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":865,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions\/865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}