Rapid Evacuation of a Data Center

Over at Slashdot, there's a discussion about strategies for rapidly evacuating an IT environment, prompted by a question from a facility in the pre-evacuation zone for the High Park wildfire outside Fort Collins. The IT Manager for Shambhala Mountain Center has asked for advice on prepping a facility with a mix of workstations and servers to be moved out of the path of the fire.

In an ideal scenario, the plans would have already been developed and tested. Lacking that, Slashdot readers are sharing tips on how to prioritize a short-order bugout and recovery plan.

There have been several instance in recent years in which wildfires threatened data centers. Last year Los Alamos National Labs, which played a key role in the Manhattan Project and houses two of the world’s leading supercomputers, took those systems offline as a wildfire approached. In 2007, a wildfires in Malibu, Calif. came within 100 feet of the data center at Pepperdine University.