Quote:
Originally Posted by BMWGUYinCO
I've mentioned this before, but I'm a Chief Technology Officer in Healthcare. About 5 years ago, I was touring some hospitals that had their "data center" within the basements of the actual hospital (I won't mention the hospital system but it is VERY large). And yes - not good to have the DC in the basement.
In any case, the wiring I saw would make a network engineer's eyes bleed; it was a spaghetti fest blown up by a nuclear bomb. At the time, I was trying to migrate their tech out of the basement and into a properly hosted data center.
I could tell you some stories that would make you never want to visit a hospital. I'll share one now though. The DC was in the basement directly below the dialysis center. One day, they experienced a leak that went through the floor and fell into exposed racks containing network hardware (Cisco Catalysts in fact). Aside from the emergency downtime, we had to have a hazmat crew come in to clean and remove contaminated equipment since the leak contained toxic organics. I don't know who originally set up the compute infrastructure in these places, but they certainly didn't know or think about what they were doing.
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Yep. Similar experiences. One where someone didn't think it was a bad idea to have an overhead chiller not be over a rack of EMC storage. Murphy came to visit one day and the entire array was literally toast.
Another situation similar to yours with the DC in the basement of the hospital. The place I was in decided to build the DC in what was formerly the parking garage for the building. Well, they didn't account for two things. One was the slope of the ground floor which caused inconsistent cooling from the pressurized raised floor from one end of the DC to the other. And the other issue which was the flooding that would occur during significant rain storms.
Another was the guys that worked under me. I had to go back and recheck their work when they ran cabling. One just ran a twisted pair copper Ethernet cable through the front of the rack to the next one and smashed the door onto the cable not caring how the door was physically crimping the cable. The other was how one of the guys didn't care about proper bend radius of the fiber cable in a rack. I happened to look over and saw light bleeding through the fiber at the bend that was too tight ran by one of my guys.
Another was someone didn't want to go through proper channels to set up a network path between two segments of the network. So they just connected a home router to bridge the networks. All heck broke loose on that one as the person created a cross contamination violation by doing an unauthorized bridging of a network at a higher classification level to one at a lower one.
And those weren't the worst of the ones I've encountered. One that comes to mind I can't speak of but would piss off any IT person that cares anything about security.