Summer Thunderstorms and Power Failures

Spring and summer are the seasons for thunderstorms although they can actually occur any time during the year. In the state of North Carolina alone during the time period between January 1, 2000 and March 3, 2009, 8040 thunderstorms occurred(1) —  and these are only the ones with hail over 1″ and wind speeds of at least 50 Knots. That is an average of 869 major storms per year during the slightly more than 9 year time period. Many more smaller or unmeasured thunderstorms occurred during that same period. Thunderstorms caused an estimated $200M to $400M in damages per year.

All of these thunderstorms often lead to power failures, lightning strikes, flooding and resulting damage and potential data and productivity loss for computers. This data loss can be due to losing work on a document or spreadsheet because it had not been saved before the power outage occurred, or it could be due to data loss during a write to the hard drive. Modern hard drives and operating systems like Linux are significantly less prone to data loss due to power failure than in the past but it can still happen.

Protecting you and your business from data and productivity loss is an important part of any disaster recovery plan. You do have one don’t you?

There are some important steps that anyone can take to protect against or to at least recover from these types of events. Regular backups with off-site storage can save your data and allow you to recover your business in the event of disaster. This is probably the most important step you can take to ensure recoverability and survivability.

But what about continuing to operate or preventing loss of data during those power outages caused by thunderstorms? This is where having a good Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is extremely important. Keeping the power flowing while the mains are down can mean the difference between instant down-time and loss of data or saving the data in your spreadsheet and doing an orderly shutdown. It can also mean the difference between simply working through the many short power failures lasting less than a few seconds and having to recreate at least part of that spreadsheet or document.

I recommend that all computers, even desktops and not just the servers, be connected to a UPS capable of maintaining power for at least 20 minutes for one or more computers connected to it. This provides a reasonable amount of time to save your work and power down the computers in a controlled manner rather than losing power and data in an instant.

Remember, protecting against data loss due to power failures, whatever their cause, is only one aspect of a complete disaster recovery and survivability plan for your business. Millennium Technology Consulting LLC can assist you with creating and implementing a disaster recovery and survivability plan tailored to your unique requirements.

(1)Data source: NOAA National Climate Data Center, database search.