Data Center Knowledge does a great job of aggregating the downtime woes that continue to manifest in ways that should or could have been addressed.

There continues to be a lesson learned from decades of computing infrastructure knowledge that stubbornly refuses to translate into a lesson remembered.

Lesson Learned: Diversity Defeats Downtime

Within the data center, diversity principles include:

• Load Balancers that spread traffic to different servers
• Diverse power feeds to equipment
• Diverse network feeds to equipment

Geographic diversity means having the ability to run services or at least the ability to re-direct services to other data centers.

• No excuses for failing to diversify your external and internal DNS. Without a way to access your DNS records and re-direct your e-mail and web destinations, you are at the mercy of your provider should a service interruption strike.
• No excuses for failing to diversify your e-mail. You need to be able to send and receive e-mail during a major service interruption.
• No excuses for failing to have a Business Continuity Plan. As the downtime stories continue to illustrate, key elements of your plan need to include what you are going to do when your infrastructure is overwhelmed.