North American Network Operators Group
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Re: data center space

  • From: Jim Popovitch
  • Date: Fri Apr 21 15:29:50 2006
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Joseph S D Yao wrote:

On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 09:34:41AM -0700, Philip Lavine wrote:
Can someone tell me if I am out of luck. I am trying to get a 10x10 cage in New Jersey (Jersey City area) but it seems everybody is at capacity. What happened? 
My guess (this being NJ) is an aftereffect of the 9/11/2001 disaster.
By five years after, most companies who could be affected by such an
outage may have relocated a continuing-operations set of machines to one
or more colo data centers.  I don't know why the data centers would not
have expanded to meet the influx, though.
Five years after 9/11 you would think that people would have located business continuity ops much further away (assuming the businesses are based in NYC) than NJ. I'm sure that regulations require them to be x miles or in another state. But all things should considered... even the capability for major catastrophic incident(s) to affect primary and (nearby) secondary sites.

I think the reasons are probably due to companies/governments thinking (hoping?) that in the event of a catastrophic event the business would be able to get ppl from site A to site B. To me it is ridiculous to assume that anyone would be left at site A, or even in the vicinity of site A. And if they are still around site A after a catastrophic event, would they behave normally and could they be counted on (families, fears, trauma, etc)? I'm an employee, but in desperate times my family comes first (that is a no brainer decision that every CIO should think about).

Put your major data/ops centers on different continents, or at least on different coasts. Not big enough to do that? Outsource to someone who is. Don't want to spend the money? Partner with a non-competing similar business that is strategically located away from yours. Don't do the minimum to insure your business survival, do the maximum.

Disclaimer: I work for someone who provides outsourcing services including the area of business continuity.

-Jim P.