Ask Slashdot: How To Evacuate a Network

First time accepted submitter gpowers writes "I am the IT Manager for Shambhala Mountain Center, near Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. We are in the pre-evacuation area for the High Park Fire. What is the best way to load 50+ workstations, 6 servers, IP phones, networking gear, printers and wireless equipment into a 17-foot U-Haul? We have limited packing supplies. We also need to spend as much time as possible working with the fire crew on fire risk mitigation."

Comments

Pictures

[Anonymous Coward]

Take lots of pictures before you unplug your cables. It will save you time when you have to reconnect everything.

Re:You don't.

[girlintraining]

The "best" way to evacuate a data center is to already have off-site back-up for your data in place, drop a fresh copy to portable media, and walk out. The hardware should be insured. The life of your and your people (at least some of whom should probably be helping their families evacuate) are far more valuable than a few months of making your insurer pay for rented hardware until your new machines show up.

Well, it's obvious the poster here was handed the job of preparing a disaster recovery plan and has no professional experience doing so... probably was given the assignment by his manager who had no idea the complexities of the task. If the OP is in that position, then it's also likely they won't see any benefit to offsite backup, or they'll blunder by putting the offsite backups in the boss' house which is three miles downwind... assuming he can even convince them to budget for it.

In that case, I'd say buy some quick-disconnect drive enclosures (the kind where you lift a lever and a harddrive is now dangling in your hand), write a formal letter of protest outlining exactly why you're not responsible for the company being wiped out, what mitigation steps you'd recommend with a proper budget, and keep a copy in a safety deposit box or some 'cloud' service far, far away from you... because yeah. -_-

Story time! I worked for a Fortune 500 company that connected consumer-grade 300watt rated UPS to racks of equipment... they were unaware of the risk of fire until I explained to them that with 2,000+ store locations and about 50 distribution centers, and 3 corporate headquarters, while the odds of any one of them failing catastrophically due to current overload was low, each one of those buildings experiences a 'power loss event' an average of a dozen times a year... so it became very likely that they would fail and cause a fire, which wouldn't be covered by insurance. Management tried to ignore it, but somehow (wink, wink) legal found out about it, and forced the Board to fix the problem post-haste to avert having to pay 50 million plus to rebuild the burned out husk of a store after the fire chief finds the flash point was a piece of equipment that was massively under-rated for the job.

Disaster planning requires a good understanding of probabilities and statistics. That understanding is surprisingly rare in the business world, despite what most people think.