New-Tech Europe | Sep 2017 | Digital Edition

Industry Lessons: Until Power Is Better Understood, BA Won’t Be an Isolated Incident

Janne Paananen, Eaton

Feeling the heat Summer, with its long hot days, warm evenings and holidays, it’s all fun in the sun. But if summer is your business’s busiest time of year and all its critical IT systems go down, causing chaos for thousands of your customers and damaging the company’s reputation, then the fun fades quicker than any holiday suntan. There are certain events that shouldn’t happen - they can’t be blamed on the weather, unscheduled maintenance or even a “power surge” – as poor planning is always the better explanation. There has been much speculation on what went wrong at BA and there’s also surprise that anything went wrong at all given the complexity and immense scale of an airline’s business and data centre operations, estimated at 500 cabinets. It’s second only to the banking industry in its size and scale and need for

100% uptime. Safety, security and customer service depend on it. Outages are not isolated incidents And yet - at a data centre industry level – this is by far an isolated incident. A survey commissioned by Eaton of IT and Data Centre managers across Europe found that 27% of respondents had suffered a prolonged outage leading to a disruptive level of downtime in the last 3 months. The vast majority of respondents (82%) agree that most critical business processes are dependent on IT and 74% say the health of the data centre directly impacts the quality of IT services. This paints a clear picture that the business depends on IT and IT depends on the data centre to function, so the fact that more than one in four data centres had recently suffered a prolonged outage tells

us that something is wrong at an industry level. Poor power planning Just as critical business processes depend on IT, the data centre itself must provide resilience to keep the business running. It’s a core facet of a business’s risk management strategy. The only thing we know for certain with the example of BA is that someone or something killed the power from the data centre, and whether it was a panicked response or a lack of knowledge, when they reapplied the power, incorrect processes exacerbated all the issues even further. We should be careful not to attribute this failure to any individual technology or person; it’s a problem of poor understanding of power that could have and should have been prevented by proper processes and power system design, especially if they’d followed

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