Slashdot Mirror
Data Disasters More Likely To Strike In Summer
Barence writes "The turbulent summer weather leads to a surge in data loss incidents, according to industry experts. Kroll Ontrack claims that it traditionally deals with around 12% more data recovery requests in the summer months than it does in the spring, with the weather largely to blame. 'The stress on electrical devices increases if you elevate the temperature,' Ontrack engineer Robert Winter told PC Pro. 'If you have devices that are going to fail, the failure may be induced by the elevated temperature.' Winter claims failure rates tend to be higher among personal and small business users, rather than large companies, which tend to have air conditioning and humidity control. Laptops and disk drives being left in direct sunlight or in the back of cars is another common cause of failure, the Ontrack engineer added. Power surges caused by electrical storms and failure to cover adequately for holidaying IT staff are other contributory factors, Ontrack claims."
When people take vacation they not only neglect regular maintenance but they leave behind some summer student to handle things.
A guy named Winter tries to pin the blame for data disasters on Summer.
News at 11!
Things sensitive to heat more likely to fail during the warmer part of the year? Whodathunkit!
But I guess that the REAL question is - How do these numbers correlate to increased incidents of broken limbs during the winter months?
Could it be that by breaking your computer you are appeasing the Gods of Breaking and so your arms and legs remain whole, and vice versa?
I think that there surely is room for further research here and that we should immediately start to break some arms and legs.
Starting with persons responsible for TFA.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I have absolutely no evidence for this suggestion, but might there also be a connection to high school students with too much time on their hands?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"Laptops and disk drives being left in direct sunlight or in the back of cars is another common cause of failure" Pretty sure that's one of those things all the paper work that comes with electronics tells you not to do. At least I think so, I haven't really bothered to read through most of that stuff in the last few years...
Free Pie! The Pie is Also Evil!
Speaking of avoiding downtime, the recently published Web Operations is excellent. Lots of good anecdotes, advice, and procedures to make things better (RCA, 5 whys, etc). I've been doing devops stuff for a while and have picked up a lot from this book.
The Army reading list
I wouldn't trust a guy called Winter to tell me which season is better...
Nothing to see here, just some slashvertisement of a recovery company
Que?
Pedant douchebag. I guess that the guy who normally states that that zit-faced nosepicker Soppsa is a troll spells it cue. My apologies.
Since right now it is winter, there is not much to worry about for a few more months.
No need to get all uptight. Que sera sera.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
News news, electronics don't like heat, news at eleven. Just another slashvertisement.
We need mirrored datacenters, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern. That way we've always got one that isn't in summer.
-or-
My data center is on the equator, you insensitive clod!
they had to quote a guy named Winter? Really??
"This stupid computer shit is a waste of time. Put in that closet with the water and no air conditioning."
(Equipment fails)
"What the fuck do you mean you can't be out here by noon to fix this shit? This is critical to my business, if its not fixed by noon I am out of business."
Is there a disconnect?
....where they don't have hurricanes.
My summer IT disaster story? Imagine a large office building. Now imagine A/C units fed by a central chiller pipe. Now imagine 20 floors' worth of chiller water coming out on the floor above yours. Then imagine water cascading down the windows, and across the drop ceiling.....
This was me in July 2005. One of the few times I didn't get dirty looks for wearing shorts and tevas in the office.
Maybe it's a slashvertisement, but if you're going after that elusive extra '9' of uptime it's certainly food for thought.
On a related note. 70% of statistics are made up.
Don't forget school is out so you get bored students who end up causing mischief.
However, the key is common sense, and this is not so common these days. How many people who have 1-2 machines bother to attach an external drive and use the backup program provided with the OS? Very few. Same with installing Mozy or Carbonite as last resort. For an average user, this would take 2 minutes to set up with Time Machine, maybe a little bit more with whatever Windows utilities are in use. For most Windows users who have a 250GB or so HDD, a 1TB external laptop drive + Retrospect configured to groom older backups would work for them almost indefinitely. Combine this with Mozy, and this would completely cover most of their needs.
Another simple thing which is pure common sense is OS restore media. One reason I always install a machine from scratch is that I then am sure in the future that this can be done later on. I never depend on using the original install provided with a machine. This philosophy applies from a netbook I am setting up for a friend to the big servers. It doesn't take much thought to have some type of container like a shoebox or plastic tub that all the computer stuff goes into and put away under the bed or somewhere that is can be recovered should something happened.
Lack of basic preparedness is an article I end up irritated about. Computers fail, just like (obligatory car analogy) cars need new tires, brake shoes, and batteries. Cars break down. Computers are the same way, from a mobile device to a mainframe.
When I get approached by people (friends, friends of friends) who have computer problems, it is almost the same type of stuff that is the problem:
1: Machine won't boot. Usually won't even get into safe mode.
2: They have no boot media. This happens due to computer makers cheaping out [1] and not including media, or people mindlessly discarding it.
3: No such thing as backups whatsoever. When I ask if the machine has been backed up recently, the reply is that if it is moved back any more, it will fall off the desk.
4: They pulled off the Windows COA sticker, or the sticker got rendered illegible by some method. This means no ability to install from OEM media.
So comes to trying to recover the machine by bringing an external drive and recovery software. I usually am able to scrape some of their stuff off, but sometimes it is a lost cause, especially with newer infections which actually install a low level driver to encrypt parts of the disk to make safe mode booting impossible.
The it is time to give the user the choice of death (TM): Buy XP media on eBay and hope they won't get scammed. Buy Windows 7 media from mail-order or a brick and mortar store. Buy a new machine (another PC with preinstalled Windows, or a Mac). Or go Linux.
Here is what I wonder about: Old school UNIX sysadmins had the fact that backups were critical drilled in their heads. You also had to have a mandatory backup rotation cycle with tapes going offsite to Iron Mountain for the machines, or you were an operator, rather than a sysadmin. Old school sysadmins never bothered with trying to recover rm-ed files. They went and mounted the tape for a restore, or they pointed the user to the .snapshot/hourly.0 directory in $HOME. Making sure you had a level 0 backup weekly (usually Friday morning because Friday evening and the weekend was when the nutty crap happened) was as part of the job as eyeballing disk space and other tasks. Whatever happened to basic computer hygiene? Backup programs are insanely easy, especially with the concept of a synthetic full, so people don't have to worry about full/incremental/differential rotations. Why don't more people do basic backups?
[1]: For the love of Bog, can't consumer level PC makers just toss in a drivers CD, Windows boot CD, an application CD, and a means to rebuild the recovery partitions? Tack on $25 to the cost of the PC if need be. Maybe as a compromise, get with motherboard makers and build an OS image into Flash ROM that can't be written to (so it can't be infected.) This way the machines can ship without media, but yet still be recoverable somehow. At least this is one of the things Dell does right.
This seems to hold true for data centers as well. There were a flurry of data center power outages in the first week of July 2009. In June 2010 there were major outages at Intuit and Amazon Web Services.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Industry experts from one company all notice that they have more problems in during summertime! Their ideas are corroborated by the idea that hot stuff breaks easier! Barry Collins (the author) should watch out, or his literary works will end up on this website: http://www.slate.com/id/2260970
my telco, for one, has hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment in enclosures in the great outdoors... and that's just the individually addressed stuff.
whoa, baby, do we replace equipment when the seasons change. much of the territory can swing from 40 below and worse to 160 degrees and worse inside those cabinets. Fahrenheit. the "field ready equipment" is spec'ed to 140 degrees in many cases.
IMPHO, field ready should mean using mil-grade parts good from -60 to +180. adds 25% to the cost. we'd save it on truck rolls alone in the first year.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
...is that script kiddies aren't in school during the summer.
How does this jive with Google's study that higher temps didn't seem to really cause hard drives to fail in their data center? http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
This is known to anybody that has at leas some awareness of what is going on with computers. The difference is large enough to be reliably observable with a small sample. i.e. the computers of your friends.
Not news, but wasted bandwidth.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is why my data center moves server locations twice a year, Feb - October - Texas then they move by ship to Brazil mid-October.
We have never had any data disaster. Though they charge 15x more than most places but it's so worth it.
Yeah, I hate summer. Gotta unplug the computer most afternoons until the afternoon thunderstorms blow by. From October to the end of March, no thunderstorms, 100% uptime.