@portfast

News & views, serious business.

Tuesday 17 March 2020 - Service implications of COVID-19

"May you live in interesting times" is apparently an apocryphal Chinese curse according to Wikipedia, and currently it seems that we do. Ireland has shut its pubs on St Patrick's day so this is serious.

We're well equipped to weather the current storm - earlier in the year we moved all our equipment from London to a data centre here in Sheffield that we have an investment in and have played a part in building. Therefore we won't be denied access to our equipment unless something very strange and unfortunate should happen like a complete lock down.

This data centre is connected out to the world by lit wave and dark fibre services to data centres in 3 other cities (Leeds, London and Manchester) where we pick up transit and peering from a number of other providers, so as long as we have electricity and failing that, diesel, the servers should be fine.

With regards to staff, there's currently one member of technical staff at the data centre (he insisted, apparently if he tried to work from home he would just end up on his playstation - we salute his honesty at least) and otherwise we've always worked remotely so it's business as usual there too.

We would also extend help to anyone in the area involved in either healthcare or the supply chains around food & equipment - if you need help with your networks at this time we have a warehouse with a load of spares and the knowledge to do something useful with them so feel free to ask.

There is also a google doc of other willing networky people here who may be useful.