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
Nothing to see here, just some slashvertisement of a recovery company
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.
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?
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.
There is already something similar, and free to boot. It is called Time Machine by Comodo and is what I give my more clueless customers. Just add a weekly Windows 7 image backup to an external HDD and all is cookies and cream, and it really makes my job easier. My GF lives 2 and a half hours away (had to move closer to her dad after his heart attack) and fixing her PC last time she had a serious fuck up took less than 10 minutes by phone with Time Machine. Really sweet.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.