Like your grandfather probably said, a failure to plan is a plan to fail. Your server room is a critical hub of your business, where you and your customers rely on the ability to warehouse crucial data. But, if you’ve got a server room that’s susceptible to environmental hazards, you may be setting yourself up for a serious failure.
When your servers are functioning correctly, it’s easy to push the “what-ifs” of a potential failure off your radar. It’s important, however, to take a hard look at your server room and consider the effect a shutdown would have on your business.
Moisture can be damaging, but heat can be truly devastating. In the best-case scenario where temperature is the culprit, your components will overheat, and the failure will initiate shutdown via an internal thermal protection system. When the temperature is reduced, your system will restart and continue to run as expected, provided that the heat threshold isn’t exceeded. Even in this best-case scenario, an overheating shut-down will still reduce the overall lifespan of your servers.
The worst-case scenario, as you’d imagine, is far more catastrophic; components overheat, and your servers experience total shutdown. While you wait for diagnosis, repair, and/or replacement of damaged components, the status of your data is unknown and in jeopardy. More importantly, the damage cause by overheating may not show immediately. Far too often the components are not failing, but have damage that will fail further down the line, causing additional down time. Obviously this is not ideal for you or your customers, and an event like this can mean expensive repair cost as manufacturers do not cover loss due to environmental conditions and you could sustain long term business loss as today’s customers expect zero down time.
The best way to avoid either of these scenarios is a thorough evaluation of your server room and the implementation of a proper environmental monitoring solution.. If that task seems daunting, this is an area where NSDS can be a great resource. We will evaluate, recommend, and install the proper monitoring devices for your specific environment and the unique challenges it presents. Our systems will take the steps necessary to alert you and insulate your data from a potentially catastrophic loss.
If you’d like to chat further, please reach out to us by calling 978-988-0201, or sending a message to sales@ns-datasystems.com.
