Data center resiliency, disaster recovery and business continuity planning will get expanded coverage at the DCD>Colo+Cloud in Dallas, on September 26, as a response to Hurricane Harvey’s impact on nearby Houston.
Business continuity and disaster recovery are well understood disciplines in the design, build, and operation of data centers but, thankfully, only rarely are they subjected to the ultimate test - a massive-scale flooding disaster delivered by the likes of Harvey and previous storms including Katrina and Sandy.
The ultimate test
Harvey slammed into low-lying coastal Texas in the waning hours of August, and barrelled straight into Houston, giving that city’s major colo and cloud data center operators an unwanted real-life chance to test their readiness to withstand a major storm. Equinix, CyrusOne, Data Foundry, and Digital Realty will all have important stories to share about what data center resiliency planning may now mean in a time of accelerating climate change in a connected world.
“Is this the major weather event that tells us whether new, software-defined cloud technologies passed their first real test?” asks DCD conference chair Bruce Taylor. “Did we get to see whether new cloud functionality, such as Resiliency-as-a-Service, Business Continuity-as-a-Service and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service were called upon?
In a newly expanded resiliency keynote roundtable, including SoftLayer’s COO, Francisco Romero and Equinix’ Technology Innovation chief Ron Batra, conference delegates will hear from and exchange views with T5 Data Centers COO Aaron Wagenheim, Digital Realty CTO Chris Sharp, CyrusOne, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer Jonathan Schildkraut, and eBay head of global data center network and security services, Eddie Schutter.
Also joining the panel will be DCD CTO Stephen Worn and W. Pitt Turner IV, global executive for the Uptime Institute Networks and an original co-author of the Uptime Institute Tier Classification System for rating data centers for uptime availability as a matter of both design/build and operational management. This combined plenary roundtable will be moderated by datacenterHawk CEO, David Liggitt.
Resilience at the Edge of Industry 4.0
Schneider Electric’s Industrial IoT Edge segment director Thomas Humphrey will discuss the requirement for continuous availability at the industrial edge in his opening remarks for DCD>Edge Leadership Roundtables on the afternoon of September 25.
“We’ll look at the convergence of IT and OT (operational technology), including the implications on industrial control systems, as well as the networks and devices supporting them,” says Humphrey, “Our ever-increasing reliance on the growing information available from our systems requires new thinking about how these edge systems are designed, managed and protected. “It becomes ever more important to assure the continuous availability of these assets. We’ll look at the trends driving IoT and Industry 4.0 adoption as well as the implications on plant and facility systems. Protecting system intelligence in modern Industry 4.0 environments (demands) provision of clean, uninterruptible power beyond servers to controllers, networks and devices themselves.”
If you’d like to attend the DCD>Colo + Cloud you can register here.