Often our customers and colleagues in the industry come to us with stories that they wouldn’t want their management or the public hearing about. In this blog series we discuss these experiences and how they could be solved - with all names and confidential information kept a secret of course.
Continuing on from our last confession we have another story to share from an outside source. There is a lot of doom and gloom in the industry about disaster scenarios. Leaks, too much humidity, lost assets – all are common issues, but what about data centers becoming so hot they literally melt down?
One company we were told about had a particularly dreadful data center disaster. during a weekend, when no staff were present and the data center was "dark," an electrical fault caused a short, which caused a spark, which caused a fire. The data center burned to the ground, destroying all the company’s assets in that location.
It gets worse! Insurance to the rescue, surely? Well ... no. Not only did the company have to deal with the loss of data, equipment and the massive capital expense of rebuilding the facility, but when the company submitted its insurance claim for its assets, it was denied.
Why? Because the company had no way of proving the assets were ever in the building. Its asset registers were incomplete and others were out of date, which meant numerous assets were unaccounted for. As a result, the company suffered millions of dollars in losses rebuying assets.
Burn Baby Burn: DC Inferno
One obvious way around this is an asset management solution that provides real-time, accurate asset tracking and audited record keeping. This provides evidence of every change and movement of individual assets and is perfect for these situations. Our complete asset lifecycle tracking ensures that every one of your enterprise assets are accounted for from the moment they arrive on the loading dock until they are ready to be disposed of (hopefully by less drastic -- and more envirnmentally friendly -- means than incineration!).
We wish we'd been on-hand to help this data center manager extinguish this issue before it began with a solution that would continuously monitor the facility and its valuable assets. Also, to prevent the data center manager getting hot under the collar again in the future with another data center disaster, perhaps he should install an environmental monitoring solution as well. Just a suggestion!
Have a data center confession you’d like to share? Send your stories to confessions@rfcode.com – we promise we’ll keep your identity a secret!
