As I write this, my family and I are digging out from under approximately 3 feet of heavy, wet, April snow. The power has been out all day and so I am writing on (gasp) paper, to be keyed in later.
One interesting part of this experience is noticing how well (or poorly!) we were prepared for an extended lack of electricity. For instance – how do get news on weather and road closures? A decade ago, we might have had a transistor radio tucked away in a drawer somewhere, but not these days. The iPhone is a serviceable substitute – good thing it was charged! (The transistor radio I had as a kid would go ten times as long on batteries as the supposedly more sophisiticated iPhone.)
There are a myriad of other simple issues that arise. Does everyone in the family know how to manually open the garage doors? Do we have enough flashlights? And how is a person supposed to survive a wintry morning without hot coffee?
For the IT professional, planning for an extended power outage involves asking a lot of questions. If the building has generators, how long does it take them to kick in? Is your server room’s battery backup adequate to cover that gap? Which servers (and workstations) are critical and which aren’t? Does clustering protect you if you lose power to shared storage? Can you fail over to an alternate site if your network links go down or your ISP goes dark?
If it’s been awhile since you’ve looked over your DR plan, might be wise to revisit it, imagining a really inconvenient scenario – like three feet of heavy, wet, April snow. Speaking of which… I have more shoveling to do.
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