Submission + - Averting Data Center Disasters with the EPO Button
1sockchuck writes: "Most data centers have an Emergency Power Off (EPO) button that will shut off power to the entire data center floor. Designed for fire prevention, the EPO (often a red button) has also triggered many accidental outages when vendors or cleaning crews have pressed it by accident. On April 15, the EPO figured in an apparent act of sabotage that crashed the data center that controls California's electrical grid. A disgruntled sysadmin was later charged in the incident. At the recent Data Center World conference, a session focused on ways to configure and manage the EPO button to reduce the risk of an accident or sabotage. "People can get killed and lives ruined by data center failures today," said data center designer Richard Sawyer. "The EPO represents a single point of failure. Make it accessible, but don't make it easy.""
