Broken water main floods Dallas data center, shuts down mainframe

Matt Stansberry Profile: Matt Stansberry

A water main break flooded a data center in Dallas, Texas this week, soaking the county’s mainframe equipment and data center.

According to Government Technology News: Water poured Monday night into the Dallas County Records Building’s basement levels, the location of the power supply for a fifth-floor computer mainframe that houses critical data such as marriage licenses and jail records of Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex residents are stored on servers. Officials were forced to shut down the building and the data center.

According to local media, a 2008 audit recommended that the county remedy its lack of a failover site for disaster recovery, but than no action was taken on the study after a few attempts at building such a capability fell through. Fortunately, the county does regularly back up its data.

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