Taking Automatic Corrective Action in Your Data Center

Data center environment monitoring should be a major factor in your organization’s business continuity plan. As part of that proactive monitoring, automatic corrective action should be a key component to help keep your data center up and running, and to quickly recover from issues when they are detected.

Automatic corrective action can go a long way towards helping preserve your IT hardware and facility, as well as helping to prevent data loss. When certain environment alarms are detected, automatic corrective actions can kick in to help take steps to mitigate the issue until you or your team can help resolve the issue at hand.

Protecting your data and servers

Let’s say that your data center’s HVAC unit goes down over a long weekend during a heat wave. The temperatures rise quickly, and your team receives alerts through both email and SMS that the temperature is past the thresholds you have set. Given the fact that it’s a long weekend, it might be at least one hour until someone is onsite to diagnose the issue, and take the steps to help start cooling your data center down.

If you have automatic corrective action as part of your business continuity plan, then certain steps can already be underway while your team is on its way to your facility.

For example, shutdown commands can be sent across your network to critical servers, allowing them to gracefully power down and save data, rather than having the heat cause server crashes. Those crashes in turn can lead to data corruption and loss. It’s far better to have your servers complete a normal data save and shutdown cycle than run that risk of crashing and losing data.

Prior to shutting these servers down, you could initiate backup scripts so you have an up to the minute copy of all production data prior to an emergency shutdown. Or, other scripts could be used to bring a secondary location online while prior to your primary location shutting down.

While your backups are running and servers are shutting down, automatic corrective action can turn fans on in your data center to help cool the air in critical areas, such as behind server racks. While this won’t help replace the HVAC, it can mean the difference between temperatures that cause data loss, and temperatures that your critical servers can still operate at. This type of action can buy you and your team the time you need to get onsite, open some doors and windows, and get that HVAC repaired.

Preventing flood damage in your facility

Automatic corrective action can take place in more than just your organization’s data center. Areas that are prone to water and flood damage, such as attics or basements, are prime candidates for protection.

For example, strategically placed flood sensors can detect the presence of water or other liquids long before someone sees them. This is especially true in areas that don’t normally see a lot of foot traffic. Heavy rains or extreme weather, along with potential plumbing issues, can introduce water into your facility when you least expect it.

Much like in the above example, automatic corrective action can turn on fans to help dry the air, and keep moisture from settling on any sensitive equipment. If your flood sensors are located in a basement, they can trigger a pump to turn on to help drain water away from your critical areas. While these actions are taking place, you and your team have also been receiving emails and SMS messages to notify you of the issue at hand.

Automatic corrective action to prevent damage

The most important aspect of proactive environment monitoring is making sure your facility, data, and assets are protected. It should be a major part of your business continuity plan, and setting up automatic corrective actions will help your organization mitigate any damages you might incur due to environment issues.  This becomes especially important when your facility gets hit with potentially damaging environment factors while no staff is on site.

If you have automatic corrective action set up along with your proactive environment monitoring, your organization will be in a much better position to help react to situations that could cause downtime, damage, and data loss. Make sure that your business continuity plan includes automatic corrective action, and help keep your facility protected.