This is another one from the archives.....When I was working at a major shoe company, I was a small part of our datacenter upgrade project. A small part not for lack of technical skill or know how but my manager and CIO decided to do it themselves thinking they knew best. I happened to be on vacation when most of the work took place and since I had no access to the plans, I had no idea what to expect. So I finally came back to the office and my co-worker says I need to check out the new space. I was asking questions on the way over. Did they put in a raised floor, how is the HVAC situation? Is there a drop ceiling? Did they run ladders between the racks? All pretty much standard stuff. It's the non-standard stuff I wasn't prepared for.....
This job was done during the summer and it was pretty hot outside. Sunny nearly every day. I walk into the room and there is a glare that temporarily blinded me. Mostly, because I wasn't expecting what I saw. They decided to pass on the drop ceiling and left 3 gigantic diagonal sky lights in place. With all the sunlight coming in, the room temperature raised about 15 degrees. Shouldn't be a problem with the high end AC's though. Except in all their wisdom they decided to pass on those as well. They put in 7000BTU units because they were on sale. $3 million dollars worth or equipment in the room and they wanted to pinch some pennies. Gotta love it. Then came my favorite part of the entire fiasco.....
As I said, it was summer time. It was dry for the most part, but it began to get very humid over the next couple of days. Followed by a huge storm. One day we noticed a pool of water on the floor of our new datacenter. Turns out the sky lights were leaking. No one took this into account. Then again, if we would have discussed this as a team, I'm sure the issue would have been addressed before we moved any equipment in there. Needless to say after it was all said and done, the Wonder Twins wound up spending a lot more fixing the issues that they caused by pinching those pennies. Funny how that kind of thing always comes back to bite you in the ass.
