As a follow-up to our inaugural blog post regarding our implementation of continuous PUE monitoring at Sybase, I wanted to share a real-world challenge Sybase recently encountered. Although Sybase is acknowledged as one of the country’s most efficient, reliable data centers, it is not without its unexpected challenges.
This spring, Sybase narrowly avoided a significant outage due to an unforeseen water leak from outside the walls of its data center. On each floor, directly above its high-availability Secure Data Center facility, are several kitchenettes (for the offices on that particular floor). On a recent weekend, a water hose popped in one of the kitchenettes connecting the sink to a cooler. Water gushed out and quickly flooded the kitchen. Worse, it eventually found its way down two stories between the walls to the data center facility below.
Sybase did not learn about the problem until one its PDUs was shut down by the leak. Luckily, its PDU redundancy avoided any outage. However, this unforeseeable leak resulted in a damaged PDU and a few downed servers.
To avoid an event such as this happening in the future, Sybase turned to Modius. Modius identified a cost-effective leak detection system to be installed in each of the kitchenettes in the building. We configured these residential-scale leak controller systems on the Modius Device Gateway and added it to the notification schema, demonstrating the versatility of our OpenData® system to capture data from practically any device used inside or outside a data center.
By utilizing one of the existing Modius I/O modules, we were able to configure and test the entire system in about 2.5 hours, providing Sybase a quick, cost-effective means to avoid an event such as this in the future.
Kind regards,
Jay H. Hartley, PhD
Director of Professional ServicesJay.Hartley[at]Modius.com