Flexential’s Tampa and Fort Lauderdale data centers were fortunate not to have been directly impacted by Hurricane Helene as the storm barreled through the South last month. However, its COO Ryan Mallory told IT Brew that the company prepared its Florida data centers for the worst all the same.
For Flexential, a data center colocation service provider with more than 40 sites in 19 markets nationwide, making sure its facilities are functional is a full-time job. Mallory told IT Brew that the company’s Florida-based data centers are home to the computing infrastructure and digital data of several healthcare systems, making operation during inclement weather crucial.
“[I]f we go down, an ambulance may not know where to respond to somebody that’s been injured…or somebody who’s been critically injured in the hospital can’t get their health records,” Mallory said.
The calm before the storm. While Flexential’s Sunshine State data centers are built to withstand up to category-five hurricanes, preparation for incoming storms is still a grand event. Mallory, who spends all of hurricane season monitoring the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane tracker to see what’s “brewing,” told IT Brew that he spotted activity related to Helene in late September and quickly alerted his operations team.
“[O]n that Monday, we activated our ‘go team,’” Mallory said.
Flexential’s go teams are employees who reside outside of the market expected to experience inclement weather. During severe weather conditions, they are deployed to overlook Flexential’s data center facilities, allowing day-to-day staff members to be at home with their families. For Hurricane Helene, Mallory told IT Brew that the team would be deployed in Tampa because of the storm’s projected path.
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Mallory and his team were able to detect that Hurricane Helene would arrive somewhere between Fort Myers and the Florida panhandle. From then, go-team members traveled in from the Georgia and North Carolina markets and Flexential activated its emergency response plan with its fuel providers, enabling it to tap fuel services from outside of the region to eliminate competition for energy from other critical infrastructures in the area.
“We activated that,” Mallory said. “We made sure that all of our storage tanks were full. We had our go team in place and then we started to track [Helene].”
Crunch time. The three days leading up to Hurricane Helene’s landfall were spent keeping a close eye on the storm’s track. Mallory told IT Brew that his team slowly increased the frequency at which they checked for updates on the storm from every 6–12 hours to round-the-clock monitoring.
Once Helene started to shift around the Big Bend of Florida, Mallory said it became clear that the storm would not directly impact Flexential’s Fort Lauderdale and Tampa data centers. The team gradually started to wind down its protection efforts.
“We kind of started to back those updates off to every six hours, and just making sure that the teams are okay,” he said.
The days following the storm were spent making sure that Flexential’s data centers were in sound condition, sending go-team members back to their respective facilities, and reflecting on lessons learned from the experience that could be applied to response plans for future disasters.
“[E]ach time something happens, we try to learn from it,” Mallory said.