While it sounds silly asking if your server room is ready for summer, the truth is that just like checking your home smoke detectors, there are actions that you should take during this time of the year.
One of the primary items you should be checking is your servers’ UPS (uninterruptible power supply). As the heat of summer rolls in, very often your office will have brown or black outs, and these types of power issues can cause corruption or loss of your critical business data. You should be testing three things: 1) power load, which means do you have too many items plugged into the UPS? 2) the age of the battery, so they can be replaced to power the UPS and your equipment for the intended amount of time. 3) are your servers running software that can read the status of the batteries, so that the servers will gracefully power themselves down prior to the batteries being fully drained
Just like replacing your smoke detector batteries during spring and fall, you should test your data backups at least twice a year. So when testing your UPS, now is a great time to test backups. And testing your backups during this biannual review should be more than just checking your backup software’s logs. What you should be doing is a “real” test, which you have a user delete or move their data from a network share, and then have the IT administrator recover the data.
The last thing to check to ensure your server room is ready for summer is checking that the AC (air-conditioning) is working properly. Servers perform at their best and operate safely at 68-70 degrees. So keeping your server room at a proper temperature and humidity is important. We recommend purchasing a cheap LCD thermometer to keep in your server room all year round. These can be purchased for as little as $7 and are well worth it.