What do you do if your data center is nearly trashed twice by forces beyond your control? That's what happened to MSApple, an Ohio-based firm that grappled twice with serious external threats - a fire elsewhere in their building that caused smoke damage to IT equipment, and a flood from a burst pipe outside the company's offices, which stopped just short of soaking the data center.
The company's solution was to build the equivalent of an IT "panic room" - a modular steel-walled data center inside the company's building that serves as a secure interior space to seal out physical hazrds. Mark Fontecchio tells MSApple's story over at TechTarget. The 2,000 square foot facility was built in a week and cost $40,000. It looks like an innovative way for companies with limited budgets to better secure parts of their data center infrastructure.