Companies running coastal data centers must prepare for growing flood fears

Hurricane Sandy served as a wake-up call for multiple coastal data centers that were wholly unprepared for the devastation that could be brought on by serious precipitation and flooding. The equipment found inside a data center is particularly vulnerable when exposed to water, and the collateral damage caused by flooding can put data centers at risk in other ways as well. That's why you've got to strongly consider flood contingencies if your firm's data center is close to the coast.

Data centers don't take well to being submerged
The fallout of 2012's Sandy demonstrated just how badly unprepared data centers could get rocked by the hurricane. Several facilities located in Lower Manhattan saw their data center rooms fill with water and entire rooms of vital equipment devastated by water, said Data Center Knowledge. Other centers suffered flood-related power outages - submersion of diesel fuel pumps prevented multiple NYC data centers from receiving power from backup generators as well.

Government Technology warned that data center operators should prepare themselves. Flooding is only expected to become more frequent going forward. A recent study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science predicted that over 1,000 coastal towns worldwide will see the water level encroach on city limits over the next 100 years. Some cities may even be completely submerged. IT decision makers who continue to shrug off flood fears as an isolated nature phenomenon are actually putting their facility at greater risks each year.

Protect your data by setting up shop on higher ground
There are plenty of strategies that IT teams can take once they recognize the danger that coastal floods pose for their data centers. One of the most obvious solutions for flood fears is to move data to higher ground. The use of gear like a remote console server makes it easy to share resources between sites located in and out of flood-risk zones. Other data centers supplement their flood solutions with a disaster recovery service on the cloud. It's impossible to prepare for every scenario, but a well-rounded plan will do a lot to protect your company's information.

Perle's wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers and network administrators with secure remote management of any device with a serial console port. Plus, they are the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market with the advanced security functionality needed to easily perform secure remote data center management and out-of-band management of IT assets from anywhere in the world.