Companies with their own colocated racks might want to consider getting their set up audited, particularly if the rack has been managed by a third party.

Timico engineers went to Docklands yesterday to perform such an audit for a customer. Their rack was intended to be set up with a fully resilient server architecture. In fact, although, there were two redundant switches in the rack the ethernet connections from each server were connected into the same switch. Each switch had a single power supply. It is easy to see that a problem with a single power feed could have resulted in a total outage for this customer.

Our audit report will include the proposal that the equipment should be distributed across two locations to provide a genuine level of resiliency. Of course Timico could provide this.