Harvey: Hurricane Preparation Tips for Data Center Managers
August 25, 2017
As Hurricane Harvey bears down on the Texas coast, expected to make landfall around Corpus Christi either tonight or Saturday morning as a dangerous Category 3 storm, the men and women who work in data centers in the area are undoubtedly earning overtime as they prepare for the storm’s onslaught. Keeping data centers operational during natural disasters can be critical to the health and safety of the affected area’s residents, as they supply the lines of communications for many first responders and provide access to valuable information about weather conditions and the state of the area’s infrastructure.
During pending disasters such as this, employees from Schneider Electric’s various data center divisions can often be found on the scene, offering their expertise to help data centers successfully get through the emergency. They’re good to have around, because as the old saying goes, they’ve been there and done that — countless times.
A month or so ago, Data Center Knowledge talked with David Gentry, Schneider’s VP of data center services, and Mark Rentzke, senior manager for its global data center services for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, on the subject of hurricane preparedness for data centers.
Both Gentry and Rentzke stressed that getting through an event such as a major hurricane unscathed depends on planning that begins well before the emergency arises.
“You have to make sure that all staff are trained on emergency preparedness for events that you are anticipating or not anticipating,” Rentzke said. “Make sure the staff understands the contingency plans, the escalation plans, the coordination from security. Make sure that if you need to load-shift any potential equipment, you know which equipment needs to be load-shifted, if you need to drop power at some point, or lower the power.”
“Once an event takes place, it’s obviously too late to acquire needed supplies,” Gentry added. “It’s also too late to assure that all the required equipment is available in top working condition — things that you might need to get through a big storm. You need to do some things upfront to assure that everything is fully charged and to train personnel on things such as proper communications and equipment operations. During an event like this, which is high-anxiety, it’s better if you can already have seen through and [given] those people on the site some points at which they know that they have to do a certain thing.”
Rentzke supplied us with a laundry list of things data center operators need to be prepared to handle:
“To ensure that the availability of the data center remains constant during this time, we make sure we have fuel. Fuel should always be checked. We make sure we have certain spare parts and tools that we need or anticipate that we may need. We make sure that everything is anchored down — if the wind comes in, you don’t want things flying around. Is there food and water? Is there bedding, if the staff needs to stay on-site, and communications equipment?
“Also, if something really bad is coming in, we will establish an emergency control room, where we will actually co-ordinate all events from. And all staff are fully aware of their roles and responsibilities in relation to the control room.