A cause for concern, a needed plan of action, and the feeling of an early omen sent to keep me on my toes, are what I’m feeling about the recent power loss. This is the third such power outage in a week and it’s time to really take heed of those warnings and do something about them, the next time I may not be so lucky.

• Firstly, I have to be more vigilant than ever about backups. That is a given.
• Secondly, I need power at my desk-side. Most of my tools are on my laptop so a suitably sized UPS needs to go on the shopping list to give me a good few hours juice. Selected other users also need juicing up – I can’t have another afternoon of users twiddling their thumbs for hours on end.
• Third, I need better sight of things. This means getting another PDU, and loading up the necessary monitoring software – not only that but I need to be using the monitoring software. I need to know instantly the draw of power on each and every UPS. The small Belkin UPS died under the pressure and I need to know this sort of information.
• Fourth, The servers need to react to an imminent critical power outage and shut themselves down. The Windows Servers and I believe the AIX machines can respond to this. I’m not sure about the phone system but as it’s Linux based there has to be scope.
• Fifth, The VoIP phone system needs its own juice. The hardware is critical to the business but is discontinued by 3Com (NBX100) so I can’t risk avoidable equipment failures. A review of the VOIP system also needs to take place.
• Sixth, I need some kind of SMS warning the moment the power goes off. I can’t rely on others to tell me, the sooner I know the sooner I can take action.
• Seventh, I need to juice up and network out a ‘war room’ for this kind of event. At least then users can go to a guaranteed working location and access their information. This room should have emergency analogue lines, a fax, a printer (not laser because of the intense power draw), terminals, and voip equipment. All this needs protecting by UPS.
• Eighth, I need an emergency box with all the relevant cables, support info and documentation handy so I’m not scrabbling around in desperation trying to find things. The focus needs to be on bringing the system back online quickly, not on trying to decide whether a particular cable is a modem or null cable.

Everything else needs to go on hold until this problem is addressed which means I won’t be able to attend the Oracle seminar tomorrow at the Space Centre in Leicester.