It's All About Power

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Disaster Recovery Planning

It's All About Power

5/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

The good news? Through it all, says Rowe, "We had our drill down." Based on the school’s experience in the great Northeast blackout of 2003, "We knew what an electrical outage would do to our space and how to manage through it." There were problems however, admits Rowe: "Until a few years ago, whenever power went out, our phone systems went out 15 minutes later." Finally, during the 2003 outage, she says, "Our campus community agreed that kind of standard was no longer tolerable."

Rowe was given budget dollars to restructure the communications hub, including phones and the internet, to include an Eaton Powerware UPS and power generator (Generac Power Systems); both models are now out of production. Now, she’s hoping the data center itself will get a generator, but the school is trying to blend that into a broader campuswide generator plan. "Funding is always an issue, particularly in Michigan," sighs Rowe.

Until then, when the power goes out, she says, "We have about 15 minutes before we have to make shutdown decisions. Then we start with non-critical services and turn those off to give people access to critical systems as long as possible."

"The key selling point of traditional telephony was the dial tone available every time the handset was picked up. When we move to VoIP, we have to provide the same level of availability. Otherwise, it’s like a step backward." -Malik Rahman, Central Piedmont CC

Monitoring for Single Points of Failure

Darrin Zeller is operations manager for The University of Tennessee-Knoxville (enrollment: 26,400), where he manages central IT operations in the areas of environment and monitoring. Although most of the outages on his campus are brief (usually caused by electrical storms), more lengthy outages can occur when animals get into the substations, causing shorts, or when crews need to bring power down on campus to do electrical work during construction projects.

"When the power goes out, we have about 15 minutes before we have to make shutdown decisions. We start with non-critical services and turn those off, to give people access to critical systems for as long as possible." -Theresa Rowe, Oakland U

Of course, outages can occur for all sorts of reasons. Recently, a breaker that feeds power to the Eaton Powerware Plus UPS from an emergency panel in an electrical room tripped during a switchover from the power generator back to the utility company. Zeller had no way of monitoring that specific power feed, because it was part of what the facilities department monitors. So even though service should have been restored to normal, the IT operations were running off of batteries. Within 15 minutes, the batteries went dead and everything crashed. The culprit, discovered a month or two after the outage: aged wiring that had gone bad.