By: Ken Carter
Executive Vice President of Data Operations and Infrastructure
AIS Data Centers
The worst has happened. An outage has occurred and you feel like your Data Center Service Provider has failed you. It’s quite possible that they have. To find out, you’ll have to ask some tough questions. Data centers are complex facilities with sophisticated equipment, procedures and engineered componentry making up the heart their operations. Essentially, you want to know what happened to cause the service outage, the scale of incident, a matrix of impacted services and components, and why – and feel confident that it won’t happen again. However, you’ll need to put on your engineering cap to really get to the truth.
If you’re aware of an outage that has occurred within your data center support infrastructure, ask your provider:
These are the technical questions you’ll need to ask to find out what occurred, why it occurred and if it’s been fixed. Your data center service provider should be willing to provide you with all of this information, including:
Once you’ve collected this information, it’s likely that you’ll want to discuss and fact check it with industry experts. Unless you are an experienced engineer, that’s the only way you’ll know for sure that the information is complete and accurate. What you’re looking for is absolute verification that your provider has identified the real problem that caused the outage and that it’s been thoroughly resolved using industry best practices.
Only an expert will be able to detect faulty reasoning and explanations within the root cause analysis and remediation documentation. By corroborating the information provided by your data center service provider with an industry expert, you can better determine the validity of the information provided, find out if the issue or issues that caused the outage were solved correctly, and be assured that similar incidences won’t occur in the future.
Ideally, you’ll find that everything was properly identified and remediation performed to the highest standards. With that information in hand, you can move forward more confidently with your current data center service provider. Alternatively, your consulting industry expert may identify gaps or inaccuracies that haven’t been addressed that could lead to potential issues in the future. Rather than a worst case scenario, this may be the perfect opportunity to shore up your infrastructure and operations with a new service provider.
It’s absolutely a data center providers’ job to avoid outages. It’s your job to do the due diligence required to ensure that you’re receiving everything you require in a continuous sustainable data center support solution. Given that there’s been an outage, your current data center service provider should be more than happy to provide you with documentation that confirms there has been a full analysis of their infrastructure to identify any potential points of failure that could potentially result in an outage. If they can’t or won’t – or an expert finds fault in their analysis: It’s time to look for someone new.
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