Years ago we had a small, in house, departmental server room at Stanford. It was by no means industrial strength but we did our best on a limited budget (secur

Years ago we had a small, in house, departmental server room at Stanford. It was by no means industrial strength but we did our best on a limited budget (security, climate control, battery backups, disaster recovery procedures, etc). One night we all got pinged about impending server failures with 30 minutes to respond before the UPS ran out of juice. Turns out the cleaning crew needed an outlet for their vacuum cleaner and decided to unplug one rack of servers to finish up their shift. This episode reminds me of a favorite haiku: We think about risks. We have contingency plans. Oops…but not for that.