Lessons Learned in a Motorcycle Crash July 30, 2008 It was a beautiful early summer morning, with sunny skies and cool air balancing each other to create the perfect weather for a motorcycle ride. I was cruising through a small town, on a route I have taken many times before. Passing by the volunteer fire department building, my attention was drawn to someone changing the letters on their sign out front. I thought the letter changer was someone I knew and I did a double take as I went by the firehouse. Just as I did, the traffic in front of me went from around 35 mph to a compete stop. I got on the brakes hard, to the point where my rear tire lifted off the ground just before I made impact with the bumper of the minivan in front of me. I was almost able to stop in time, but not quite. I flipped over the handlebars and rolled in mid-air, landing on my back and rear end. The minivan had moved forward just as I made contact with it, which cleared my landing zone on the pavement. Within seconds I was surrounded by volunteer firemen, some of whom were EMTs. They made sure I didn't move right away and I cooperated with them, since I had never been in a situation like this and thought I should listen to the experts. As it turned out I had no real injuries and I was eventually able to ride away. This was undoubtedly because I was wearing all my safety gear: a jacket with built-in body armor, heavy jeans, boots, gloves and a top-quality helmet. Without this safety gear—especially the helmet—my embarrassing accident would have resulted in a trip to the hospital. So what does this have to do with data center protection? It shows that you must take all possible precautions to protect against threats to what you value. I wear protective gear when I ride to mitigate the risk of physical injury, just as data center operators must protect their IT infrastructure from fire, flood, intrusion and other risks. Data centers are especially at risk of fire, since the high voltage transformers and heavy duty cooling systems they require are a frequent source of fires. IT equipment is also very vulnerable to damage from heat and smoke, just like the human body is very vulnerable to injury when riding a motorcycle. Firelock(R) server vaults can keep the temperature below 125°F (the point at which data is lost) for up to four hours, even if temperatures reach 2,000°F outside the vault. The density of equipment and the volume of mission critical information in server rooms are constantly increasing, so the need to protect this valuable area of the data center is paramount. One final analogy: the cost of protecting IT infrastructure with a Firelock(R) server vault is a very small percentage of the cost of recovering from a fire that damages the server room, just like the cost of proper riding gear is a small fraction of the cost of the medical bills incurred when you crash without it. My motorcycle (a Honda CBR 600 F4) had only cosmetic damage and after installing $90-worth of new parts from eBay it is almost as good as new. The minivan I hit had a scuffed bumper, so my insurance paid $679 to replace it (which I'm sure my insurance company will get back from me one way or another). This was a very humbling experience for me, since I learned to ride when I lived in downtown Chicago and riding in city traffic is nothing new to me. Having this traffic accident in a small town showed me that I had become complacent. Fortunately, I've always followed the advice given to me in the motorcycle training course I took in Chicago: dress for the crash, not the ride. In other words, be prepared for the worst-case scenario.