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October 29, 2007, 01:51 PM ET
Wildfires Give Pepperdine's Data Center a Scare
In the months following Hurricane Katrina, many campus computing officials pondered their own ability to deal with disaster: If a natural emergency threatened their entire IT infrastructure, how would they cope?
The wildfires sweeping through southern California forced technology staffers at Pepperdine University to find out, as Computerworld notes: The first warning that Timothy Chester, the CIO of Pepperdine University, had of the wildfire that would threaten the Malibu, Calif., campus came when the power went out in his home. It was 5 a.m. Sunday. Within a matter of hours, brush fires came within 100 feet of the data center — and there was a point, said Mr. Chester, where “we had serious concern that the data center itself was going to be jeopardized.”
Within a few hours of that power outage, Mr. Chester had made it to Pepperdine’s data center, paged other IT officials, shut down key applications, and moved hard drives and backup tapes to a fireproof safe. In the end, the data center never went offline, and Mr. Chester didn’t have to clean up fire damage. But the scare at Pepperdine demonstrates how well-prepared and alert IT emergency-response teams need to be. —Brock Read
Categories: Leadership
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