Along with the efforts to get the building's pumping system in operation, Robert Miggins, senior vice president of business development at Peer1, said the company is working on alternative methods to pump fuel up to the roof.
Miggins said the data center remains online, in part, because the company didn't keep the situation it faced in New York a secret. "We choose to tell customers all the details and that is what led them to show up and enable them to lend a hand," he said.
Without that notice, "we wouldn't have had the manpower there to actually bring the fuel up in time," Miggins said. "There's a lot of good will, and there's a lot of hard work and there's a few lucky bounces for good measure," he said.
No one is going to feel comfortable until power is fully restored. Spolsky said his staff has been marking the company's physical systems to speed reassembly at another data center if the need arises.
If there's any takeaway from this experience, it may be this: Casalena said he's glad he went to the data center when he did to help and to take an active role. Otherwise, "I don't know how this would have played out," he said.
Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed. His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.
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