18 / 84
Feeling the heat
Summer, with its long hot days,
warm evenings and holidays, it’s
all fun in the sun. But if summer is
your business’s busiest time of year
and all its critical IT systems go
down, causing chaos for thousands
of your customers and damaging
the company’s reputation, then the
fun fades quicker than any holiday
suntan.
There are certain events that
shouldn’t happen - they can’t be
blamed on the weather, unscheduled
maintenance or even a “power
surge” – as poor planning is always
the better explanation. There has
been much speculation on what
went wrong at BA and there’s
also surprise that anything went
wrong at all given the complexity
and immense scale of an airline’s
business and data centre operations,
estimated at 500 cabinets. It’s
second only to the banking industry
in its size and scale and need for
100% uptime. Safety, security and
customer service depend on it.
Outages are not isolated
incidents
And yet - at a data centre industry
level – this is by far an isolated
incident. A survey commissioned
by Eaton of IT and Data Centre
managers across Europe found that
27% of respondents had suffered
a prolonged outage leading to a
disruptive level of downtime in the
last 3 months. The vast majority
of respondents (82%) agree that
most critical business processes are
dependent on IT and 74% say the
health of the data centre directly
impacts the quality of IT services.
This paints a clear picture that
the business depends on IT and
IT depends on the data centre to
function, so the fact that more than
one in four data centres had recently
suffered a prolonged outage tells
us that something is wrong at an
industry level.
Poor power planning
Just as critical business processes
depend on IT, the data centre itself
must provide resilience to keep the
business running. It’s a core facet
of a business’s risk management
strategy.
The only thing we know for certain
with the example of BA is that
someone or something killed the
power from the data centre, and
whether it was a panicked response
or a lack of knowledge, when they
reapplied the power, incorrect
processes exacerbated all the issues
even further. We should be careful
not to attribute this failure to any
individual technology or person; it’s
a problem of poor understanding of
power that could have and should
have been prevented by proper
processes and power system
design, especially if they’d followed
Industry Lessons: Until Power Is Better
Understood, BA Won’t Be an Isolated Incident
Janne Paananen, Eaton
18 l New-Tech Magazine Europe