Cascading problems in business continuity

In planning disaster recovery and business continuity strategies, there's often an assumption that once responsibility has been passed to an external party such as a data centre, contingencies have been covered. However, the following story shows how external agencies can themselves be subject to interruption.

Emergency water repairs near Central Station may have led to a short outage at the Macquarie Data Centre in Sydney early on Saturday morning, affecting its hosting customers. A spokesman for the data centre said it lost water supply late the night before, affecting its air conditioner. It switched to secondary and tertiary backup cooling systems and auxiliary power, the spokesman said. Equipment in the managed services area was turned off after 7am Saturday AEST. "The managed hardware area was restored and operational by 9am," the spokesman said.

Indications are that a leaking nearby fire hydrant may have cut water services to buildings, although its timing is in dispute.