Friday, April 21, 2006

Casual Jeans Whatever! Casual Jeans Whatever!

Today might actually be interesting in a sick sort of way. Here is the deal . . .

I work in a high-availability data center. The sales staff works very hard to sell people on the idea that we won't lose power and that their data and network services will be safe. The weird thing is, they are right. Power is distributed to two UPS devices bigger than my living room, each covering one half of every server. They can keep the power on in the data center for about half an hour in the event of an outage, but they don't need to.
If it even looks shady, power gets cut over to the generators, which can supply the network and computer stuff with power for at least a week, maybe more - it mostly depends on how much fuel we have on site.
None of this redundant awesome power works in the rest of the building, though, so every flicker sends a sales person (even ones who have been here over five years) dashing into the Control Center to freak out about Service Level Agreements and Guaranteed uptime.
Today it is raining a lot. On a clear day, power is spotty in Houston. There is no way the lights are staying on.
I'm tempted to stack some boxes just inside the door, but only because an actual tripwire might be too blatant.
Plans for the day include listening to it rain and watching the people that sell (but evidently don't understand) high-availability data services run around like we are expecting a meteor hit any second. I'm ready. Watch:

"I think we might have lost power. Did your customer really need that data? I mean seriously."

"As long as my iPod has a charge, I don't care what the servers are using for power."

"I hope we still have enough gas for the generators. The CEO has been siphoning for a couple of weeks."

"Did the lights just flicker? I thought I passed out. I'm pretty drunk right now."

This could keep me busy all day, but an amused busy beats a bored-out-of-my-skull busy almost every time.

4 comments:

Joe said...

Randomly sing songs like "The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia" ... or perhaps go find a flashlight, turn off the room lights, and wave the flashlight around like you're chasing E.T. in the opening scene. Guaranteed to freak out a salesperson.

Garrick said...

So . . . Game Saturday, Joe? WTF? LOL! ROTFLMGDAO!!!1!!! OMG!!!! w00+!!!!

Darrell Davis said...

I say YES!, G your such a net Geek

Garrick said...

No response from Joe.

J03 = +3h L4M3