How Advanced Planning Can Help Reduce Impacts of Data Center Outages

Data Centers are subject to outages in power or network connectivity that can adversely affect services that rely on them. As far as clients are concerned, a significant outage can ruin their opinion of the business. Case in point? Recent outages of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service in Europe for a few hours left thousands of clients in disarray.

Though there are efficient recovery mechanisms, it is wise to take precautions to ensure that outages have minimal impact on clients. Waiting for a mishap to occur in order to exercise recovery procedures is the biggest mistake that a Data Center company can make. An outage, whether small or big, can be catastrophic in impact. Even a small manmade mistake can cause the entire service to shut down abruptly. Some tips that you can use to tackle data center outages are:

1. Always have a backup mechanism such as redundant servers that will ensure that your services maintain stability and are able to recover as quickly as possible from an outage.
2. Keep a well defined recovery agenda always ready so that you can quickly exercise it and find the root cause of the problem when it surfaces.
3. Have a To Do list ready at times of emergency that gives valuable tips on possible recovery steps, information on whom to contact for help, and other information on how to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
4. Use a highly efficient Data Center Infrastructure Management Solution (DCIM) to help identify the root cause of problems as and when they occur.

So planning ahead and equipping yourself with all necessary measures to combat a Data Center Downtime is the best option to help reduce the impact of data center outage.

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.