Indy’s 12 hour I-70 closure and the cost of downtime

Last Thursday, a segment of interstate highway I-70 was closed inside of the Indianapolis I-465 beltway from 7am to 7pm. The reason for this “scheduled outage” was twofold: Eli Lilly donated employee labor for the beautification of the stretch of I-70 from the airport to downtown. Lilly employees planted trees and flowers all along the exits. Indiana DOT also worked on the stretch of highway, taking advantage of the scheduled outage.

This “outage” caused a great deal of complaining in the media and on Twitter. Why was it done in the middle of the week? Why didn’t “they” give more warning? What the heck were they thinking, rerouting traffic to plant a few trees?

But who did the outage really affect? Was it a just a matter of inconvenience? Or did businesses along the highway suffer lost revenues? Did missed appointments from rerouting result in lost sales? To some, the cost of the outage may have been high. To others, it was a non-issue.

This metaphor applies to your data center uptime. Do you lose revenue when your systems are down? Do you stand to lose clients? You know business and its dependency on your most important computer systems. If a day of downtime is too expensive, talk to the data center uptime experts at Lifeline Data Centers. Lifeline’s affordable colocation with 99.995% uptime can reduce or eliminate the most common causes of data center downtime.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.