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Shark Tank: School days
51 comments- IT TOPICS:Hardware, Personal Technology, Servers & Data Center
It's the 1980s, and this Midwestern bank has taken a different approach to siting its data center, according to a pilot fish working there: It's in what used to be a high school.
"It worked out pretty well," fish says. "Classrooms on the first and second floors became application groups and the systems team was housed in the basement with the cafeteria. The center of the building, which used to be the gymnasium/theater, was converted to the computer room."
Up on the gym's stage are the high-reliability servers used for credit card processing. Mainframes and disk and tape drives are on the main gym floor, which has been raised to create a subfloor.
And that works pretty well, at least until one summer day when a big storm dumps several inches of rain on the building very quickly.
Rainwater coming off the flat roof is channeled through the building in drain pipes to the storm drain. But the torrent of water is so heavy that one of the drain pipes bursts -- and it's right next to the cable trough.
"That sent the rainwater from the roof through the cable trough and into the computer room subfloor," reports fish.
"Operations put out a call for all hands, and bucket brigades were set up to move the water out the doors.
"Meanwhile, an electrician monitored the voltage in the water. You see, the computers were up the entire time and never did go down -- even with several inches of water over all the cables."
School's back in session and Sharky's back to looking for true tales of IT life. Send yours to me at sharky@computerworld.com . You'll get a sizzling Shark shirt if I use it! You can also add comments by using the form at the bottom of this page.
See more Shark Tank stories at the Sharkives.
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