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Security IT Technology

Data Disasters More Likely To Strike In Summer 61

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sure-true-here dept.
Barence writes "The turbulent summer weather leads to a surge in data loss incidents, according to industry experts. Kroll Ontrack claims that it traditionally deals with around 12% more data recovery requests in the summer months than it does in the spring, with the weather largely to blame. 'The stress on electrical devices increases if you elevate the temperature,' Ontrack engineer Robert Winter told PC Pro. 'If you have devices that are going to fail, the failure may be induced by the elevated temperature.' Winter claims failure rates tend to be higher among personal and small business users, rather than large companies, which tend to have air conditioning and humidity control. Laptops and disk drives being left in direct sunlight or in the back of cars is another common cause of failure, the Ontrack engineer added. Power surges caused by electrical storms and failure to cover adequately for holidaying IT staff are other contributory factors, Ontrack claims."
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Data Disasters More Likely To Strike In Summer More

Data Disasters More Likely To Strike In Summer

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  • Vacation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Russ1642 ( 1087959 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2010 @12:58PM (#33217140)
    When people take vacation they not only neglect regular maintenance but they leave behind some summer student to handle things.
    • The first line of TFA is:

      British summer leads to a surge in data loss incidents, according to industry experts

      So apparently this means nothing to the other 99.6% or so of the world's population.

    • Which is why backup should be ones primary focus. For home computers backblaze does a really good job of taking the thinking out of the process. Automatic exclusion based backups are really the way to go for that precise reason. Sure you end up spending more in media and possibly transfer costs, but it's far less likely that you'll miss files that you need. Which also makes it less problematic when you have to take a week off and the only person available to handle things isn't the person that normally does

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mlts ( 1038732 ) *

        I'd augment Backblaze by having some form of backup on your LAN. It could be a directly attached HDD, a NAS, a tape drive, or something along those lines. This way, when something happens, it is a lot faster to fetch the 1-2TB on your system from an external HDD than it is to wait for the stuff to be re-downloaded via a cloud though a slow pipe.

        Plus, there is always the fact that nothing is 100%. One never knows if the backup cloud provider may go down, so storing all one's eggs in that basket may not be

  • Summer - Winter (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11, 2010 @01:01PM (#33217206)

    A guy named Winter tries to pin the blame for data disasters on Summer.

    News at 11!

  • Things sensitive to heat more likely to fail during the warmer part of the year? Whodathunkit!

    But I guess that the REAL question is - How do these numbers correlate to increased incidents of broken limbs during the winter months?
    Could it be that by breaking your computer you are appeasing the Gods of Breaking and so your arms and legs remain whole, and vice versa?

    I think that there surely is room for further research here and that we should immediately start to break some arms and legs.
    Starting with persons

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Things sensitive to heat more likely to fail during the warmer part of the year?

      Not for the reasons you think.

      MBA: Drone, turn off this heating system, it's summer now.
      Sysadmin: The heating system is also the cooling system, it's keeping the servers cool.
      MBA: Turn it off anyway, this is costing us hundreds of dollars.
      Some weeks later.
      MBA: Why did the server fail, it cost us thousands of dollars.
      Sysadmin: Because dickless told us to turn off the cooling system.

      • That still falls under my original definition.

        Also, even TFS explains that THAT is not really the case:

        Winter claims failure rates tend to be higher among personal and small business users, rather than large companies, which tend to have air conditioning and humidity control.
        Laptops and disk drives being left in direct sunlight or in the back of cars is another common cause of failure, the Ontrack engineer added.

        BTW, both persons in your story deserve to be on the "there's the door" short-list.
        Both are obviously high and mighty knowitalls with zero communication skills and no comprehension of the work-flow OR the chain of command in the company.
        Also, their abilities to cause problems through conscious uninformed action in one and conscious informed inaction in other case are perfectly matched.
        And lets not even sta

  • I have absolutely no evidence for this suggestion, but might there also be a connection to high school students with too much time on their hands?

    • How many high school students have the cash to call a recovery company if their hard disk fails?

      • It said "data disasters", not specifically hard drive failures. I was thinking of the kid who gets root on someone else's machine and runs 'rm -rf /', or whatever the equivalent on Windows is.

  • "Laptops and disk drives being left in direct sunlight or in the back of cars is another common cause of failure" Pretty sure that's one of those things all the paper work that comes with electronics tells you not to do. At least I think so, I haven't really bothered to read through most of that stuff in the last few years...

  • Speaking of avoiding downtime, the recently published Web Operations [amazon.com] is excellent. Lots of good anecdotes, advice, and procedures to make things better (RCA, 5 whys, etc). I've been doing devops stuff for a while and have picked up a lot from this book.

  • Salashvertisement (Score:5, Informative)

    by hviniciusg ( 1481907 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2010 @01:21PM (#33217532)

    Nothing to see here, just some slashvertisement of a recovery company

  • News news, electronics don't like heat, news at eleven. Just another slashvertisement.

  • We need mirrored datacenters, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern. That way we've always got one that isn't in summer.

    -or-

    My data center is on the equator, you insensitive clod!

  • they had to quote a guy named Winter? Really??

  • Small business' attitude (Score:5, Insightful)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2010 @01:52PM (#33218094)

    "This stupid computer shit is a waste of time. Put in that closet with the water and no air conditioning."

    (Equipment fails)

    "What the fuck do you mean you can't be out here by noon to fix this shit? This is critical to my business, if its not fixed by noon I am out of business."

    Is there a disconnect?

    • "This stupid computer shit is a waste of time. Put in that closet with the water and no air conditioning."

      (Equipment fails)

      "What the fuck do you mean you can't be out here by noon to fix this shit? This is critical to my business, if its not fixed by noon I am out of business."

      Is there a disconnect?

      can't agree more, I always find myself going into server rooms that are actually a restroom or dwarves holes under some staircase, and of course nobody cleaned up this places nor the computers in the last century, so it's a bit like being Indiana Jones

  • ....where they don't have hurricanes.

    My summer IT disaster story? Imagine a large office building. Now imagine A/C units fed by a central chiller pipe. Now imagine 20 floors' worth of chiller water coming out on the floor above yours. Then imagine water cascading down the windows, and across the drop ceiling.....

    This was me in July 2005. One of the few times I didn't get dirty looks for wearing shorts and tevas in the office.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zerth ( 26112 )

      In my case, it is all those AC units stressing the grid. Or lightning strikes from 5 minute storms.

      Just this month we've had 3 strikes and 2 power outages(one that only affected us for 9 hours, but rural areas were out for days). Pull lightning-struck equipment, then *bzzt* sag/surge/sag/black not 10 minutes later.

      • Yeah, this was all at a radio station, so the important stuff was on conditioned power. Still doesn't like getting wet. :-) Luckily, most of the broadcast equipment stayed dry. The sales floor, where nothing was on UPS power, well....

        Let's just say that it was really a good thing that a local equipment company we did lots of work through happened to have ten PCs in stock.

        On a similar note, when the power company would near peake capacity, we'd have to go to generator on a couple of our transmitters (one

  • On a related note. 70% of statistics are made up.

  • Applies to Data Centers, Too (Score:3, Informative)

    by miller60 ( 554835 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2010 @02:31PM (#33218664) Homepage
    This seems to hold true for data centers as well. There were a flurry of data center power outages [slashdot.org] in the first week of July 2009. In June 2010 there were major outages at Intuit [datacenterknowledge.com] and Amazon Web Services [datacenterknowledge.com].
  • Industry experts from one company all notice that they have more problems in during summertime! Their ideas are corroborated by the idea that hot stuff breaks easier! Barry Collins (the author) should watch out, or his literary works will end up on this website: http://www.slate.com/id/2260970 [slate.com]

  • my telco, for one, has hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment in enclosures in the great outdoors... and that's just the individually addressed stuff.

    whoa, baby, do we replace equipment when the seasons change. much of the territory can swing from 40 below and worse to 160 degrees and worse inside those cabinets. Fahrenheit. the "field ready equipment" is spec'ed to 140 degrees in many cases.

    IMPHO, field ready should mean using mil-grade parts good from -60 to +180. adds 25% to the cost. we'd sav

  • How does this jive with Google's study that higher temps didn't seem to really cause hard drives to fail in their data center? http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf [googleusercontent.com]

  • This is known to anybody that has at leas some awareness of what is going on with computers. The difference is large enough to be reliably observable with a small sample. i.e. the computers of your friends.

    Not news, but wasted bandwidth.

  • This is why my data center moves server locations (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is why my data center moves server locations twice a year, Feb - October - Texas then they move by ship to Brazil mid-October.
    We have never had any data disaster. Though they charge 15x more than most places but it's so worth it.

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