Water Main Break Floods Dallas Data Center

miller60 writes "IT systems in Dallas County were offline for three days last week after a water main break flooded the basement of the Dallas County Records Building, which houses the UPS systems and other electrical equipment supporting a data center in the building. The county does not have a backup data center, despite warnings that it faced the risk of service disruption without one."

Comments

Silly rabbit.

[migla]

There should always be duplication of critical components of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[jo_ham]

This is Texas - God is their backup solution.

Every night they pray for no hardware failures.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[vlm]

There should always be duplication of critical components of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system,

Yeah that might be the intent, but it only works if the combined reliability is higher than individual reliability. Transfer switches I'm looking at you! I have worked at numerous facilities with data centers, and inevitably the transfer switch is less reliable than either wall AC power, or the diesels (youch!). Yes I know exactly what I'm saying, that at every facility I've worked at, power reliability would have been higher without the transfer switch and the generators. But its politically incorrect as the rare wall AC power failure would be unacceptable unless we spent money on switches and gens. As long as you spend money on switches and gens, any low level of reliability is acceptable.

Your mileage may vary, maybe coastie cities have less reliable power. Don't know.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

God is their backup solution.

If this is true, shouldn't they have been prepared for a flood?

Re:Silly rabbit.

[gyrogeerloose]

Their mistake was preparing for the burning bush, from the oil spill, instead of the flood.

They should have known better, having already passed off their burning Bush to the rest of the United States back in 2000.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Texas, we are proud of our faith.

Which is incredibly funny, especially considering that pride is considered one of the deadly sins (along with lust, greed, gluttony, and several others that Texans are well known for). Apparently too many of you are too busy thumping your chests about how you are such good Christians to even stop to consider what it really means to be a good Christian.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[jo_ham]

It is quite possible to take Christians seriously and still make jokes about them. Some of the most devout Christians I know make jokes about their faith and God all the time.

One of the defining human characteristics is being able to laugh at yourself.

I make similar jokes about Apple users, Linux users, Football fans, people who drink Mountain Dew, atheists, rock fans, sci fi nerds, people who watch reality TV...

Humour is part of human character. You appear to be missing yours. Perhaps you should pray for it to return.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[Crudely_Indecent]

This is Dallas, where the City Council is doing such a good job, they're trying to get 270% raises and to double the length of their terms.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[couchslug]

"This is Texas - God is their backup solution."

So much for that. I prayed to Allah for a flood.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[AK Marc]

I know you meant to be funny, but the City of Dallas and the County of Dallas are distinct and unrelated governmental entities. You are complaining about the city, but the county is the one affected by the flood. Don't tarnish the bad name of the city with the bad name of the county.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[victorhooi]

heya,

Haha, silly little boy...*grins*.

Ok, firstly, the seven deadly sins is actually a Catholic device, and even then it's just a categorisation thing, it's not Biblical, from what I can tell. The majority of Texans are, from memory, Evangelical Christians? As a Christian, a sin is a sin is a sin - they're all bad, and we all do them, Christian or otherwise. In the eyes of God, they're actually all "equally bad", if that makes any sense. I'm not going to go into a lengthy discourse on why, but ask any Christian, and they'll be happy to help answer your question.

Read the bible - there is only one unforgivable sin - and that is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, such as the Pharisees did. Everything else is by definition, forgivable via Jesus. Also, put it this way, if you're worried you've committed the unforgivable sin, then by definition you haven't (I'm paraphrasing Larry Richards here).

And in terms of proud of their faith...err, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, according to the Bible, your God is actually one of the few things you're meant to be proud of, that and being saved from sin by Jesus, and all that. The Bible repeatedly tells you to be proud about your God, the living God etc. etc.

So your feeble attempt to accuse Christians of not knowing their faith just fell flat on it's face.

Now, as a Christian, if you were to accuse us of other things, I'd be happy to entertain you, and indulge in self-reflection. However, please use an actual valid point if you're going to try to do that. We've done some questionable things in the past, and I'm sure we'll continue to stumble, and pick ourselves up, going forward. The one thing that differentiates us if that we're saved via Jesus, and that's an external thing.

So I don't think Texans (or Christians) are proud, in the sense that you might use the word pride (e.g. proud of what you've achieved), they're simply proud that God has saved them.

Cheers,
Victor

Re:Silly rabbit.

[Leebert]

There should always be duplication of critical components of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe.

Let me try to reply a bit more constructively than some of the others here.

It is never a foregone conclusion that you will always have duplication of critical components of a system, if you are doing proper risk management.

Essentially, the art of risk management is figuring out how far to go with mitigations of various risks.

To illustrate with an excessively simplistic example (Assume a perfect vacuum and a frictionless environment):

Let's say you sell something online, you sell W products/hour, and if you miss a sale, that's it, you're not getting it back.

So that means that you lose the profit on W products every hour, let's call that X.

Next, you look at the potential hazards, and calculate how often you expect to have each hazard occur per year. For example, to be simple, let's pretend your only hazard is that you expect the basement to flood once every 20 years, causing a complete outage of your data center. This means your Annualized Rate of Occurrence (ARO) is 0.05 basement floods/year.

Further suppose that you expect a downtime from a basement flooding to last, say, 24 hours. That means your Single Loss Expectancy is your profits per hour, X, times 24 hours, let's call that Y.

From Y and 0.05, we can calculate the Annualized Loss Expectancy, that is, the cost of a single occurrence times the probability of occurrence in any given year. So let's let Z be the ALE of (Y * 0.05).

If the annualized cost of having an alternate data center to mitigate only the risk of flooding exceeds Z, the Annualized Loss Expectancy, you do not invest in an alternate data center, because it makes no business sense. You just take the loss when it happens, because it's cheaper than dealing preventing it.

Of course, it's *never* quite this simple, and sometimes the SLE is essentially infinite (such as when loss of life could occur) and thus you spare no expense in mitigating the risk. Sometimes, you can't easily quantify the cost, because it isn't always money, it could be, for example, reputation.

But it is *never* a foregone conclusion that you should automatically spend money mitigating risk without first thinking about if the mitigation costs more than the risk itself.

Re:Silly rabbit.

[neonKow]

Seriously, have you ever actually read any respectable theology? No, probably not, which is why you promote these misinterpretations and equivocations. Go read some of the top theologians of our day, and then tell me how stupid you think it all sounds. You are not qualified to engage in reasoned discussion on this issue until you have.

And this, boys and girls, would be what sinful pride looks like.

Sewer line

[Anonymous Coward]

At least it wasn't a sewer line break, that would be real shitty.

Who's idea...

[Pharmboy]

Whose bright idea was it to put the UPS and backup systems in the portion of the building that is first to be flooded, and the most devastated in just about any natural disaster, AND the least accessible afterward? Sounds like something a government would do....

Re:Who's idea...

[NewWorldDan]

.... and it's also the part of the building that's easier to cool and isn't in demand for office space. A lot of businesses put their data centers in basements. I've seen a few places that built dedicated buildings for the data center, but usually, cost dictates that they stick it where they can.

Frankly, while it will be a pain in the butt for 2 weeks, they'll get through this just fine. If they had a redundant data center, people would be whining about the waste of money and so on. There's no right answer here.

Re:Who's idea...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's a terrible plan; but putting the heavy stuff in the basement makes life easier(unless your building was purpose-built, or you have serious renovation funds, putting thousands of pounds of UPSes on one of the upper floors isn't always one of your choices). And, more generally, there seems to be this perverse part of human nature that clings to the atavistic belief that stuff you don't have to look at isn't an issue. We put the ugly, heavy, parts of the system in the basement, we bury dangerous chemical wastes(where it is virtually impossible to inspect them for leakage, and all leakage goes directly to the water table) rather than putting them on the second floor(where discovering leaks is as easy as walking through the first floor)...

Re:Who's idea...

[Nemesisghost]

Actually most buildings in Texas are built where the basement is the most structurally sound part of the building. This is because the biggest 'natural' disaster are tornadoes. This is especially true of older buildings(like most government buildings). There's only one state run building I know of that was built any other way. It's one of the state backup centers in West Central Texas. They spent 2-3x the amount of a comparable building so that the top floor could withstand hurricane force winds. They didn't do it because it was easy or economical, they did it because if you want to remain safe during a major storm, you head to the basement.

Texas doesn't need backup.

[copponex]

In a state as blessed as Texas, they were told that God would provide protection against acts of God. I imagine many of the faithful are confused, especially when Jesus day is only a few days away.

Maybe they didn't execute enough retarded people this year?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Day

Re:Texas doesn't need backup.

[PopeRatzo]

While Governor of Texas, Former President George W. Bush, signed a bill into law proclaiming June 10, 2000 to be Jesus Day

Wow.

This year, they decided to re-write textbooks to eliminate the "liberal bias".

You know what? Maybe the Dallas datacenter going out without a backup is a blessing in disquise.

You think we could get Texas to secede if we asked them real nice? We can give them Arizona and a state to be named later, as long as they promise to never tell anyone that they were once part of the United States.

Re:Texas doesn't need backup.

[PopeRatzo]

That wouldn't work -- existing historical records show that Texas has been part of the United States

We could re-write the textbooks to eliminate the bias toward truth.

It would only be fitting.

Prepared government or small government pick one

[zerofoo]

Data center floods, Katrina, and the BP oil spill the Gulf. All have one thing in common - a government that was not prepared.

I chuckle when I hear my more conservative friends complain about the level of competence or disaster response times we find in government. These are the very same people who want less government and lower taxes.

You can not have a small, cheap, government that is staffed by geniuses and prepared for every possible problem. Smart people cost money, resources cost money.

While this flood was an avoidable occurrence, do taxpayers really want to pay for redundant EVERYTHING at the local, state, and federal government? Probably not.

-ted

Someone forgot the rules...

[U8MyData]

From the movie Contact: "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" Load balanced and replicated no less. Basement + critical systems = bad idea. Not only for flooding potential, but bad sewer systems as well. Yes been there done that. Curious, is there a systems engineer that could make a good argument for building data center infrastructure in a basement. Two points already for shielding from severe weather; anything else?

Re:Someone forgot the rules...

[Renraku]

Climate control is easier in the basement. You can build big fuckoff heat exchangers that go under ground level and surface however far from the building you want them to surface.

Simpler wiring plans because you don't have to run big industrial power cables up to the top floor and the data lines don't have to go far to get to the basement.

All that being said, below-ground server rooms should have some method to be able to seal themselves off from the rest of the world in case of flooding. Perhaps the elevator or hallway door can form a decent seal, whereas everything else is already as sealed as it can be. Perhaps sealing everything also cuts power so nothing overheats.

Some clarifications

[rabtech]

First, this is Dallas County, not Dallas city.

Second, they knew about the potential for failure and were working on setting up a backup data center. TxDOT denied them rights of way to lay fiber along the highway into a facility in Tarrant county, so they were looking at other potential sites in Garland. Unfortunately this happened before they got it all resolved.

TxDOT might have had good reasons for denying the request, I don't know, but I would wager that the backup site would be a lot further along if they had been able to run that fiber. Sometimes you know there is a problem, management agrees, and you even have a budget to fix it... but someone else (another department, another company, a government agency, etc) stands in the way.