Wednesday, May 16, 2012

A torch for the server room - A start-up story

When my partner Mark and I started the company in his house deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, we converted the newly rebuilt garage - it had burned up the previous year- into a server room. Not your typical server room with raised floors, white tiles, sub-zero temperature and cables neatly arranged, but rather rows of racks in a poorly lit, dusty - well - garage! Inevitably, due to this rather rough environment servers would go down.

We all learned to "reboot", including Manni, our data analyst, who had recently moved here from England. It was getting dark when a server went down and Manni offered to go reboot. He was back in a few minutes.

"Mark, have you a torch for the server room?"
Mark looked at him with great consternation. "Manni, I know the server is down, but do you really want a torch? Isn't that a bit drastic? Manni, please, can we talk about this first?"

Laughing, I handed Manni a flashlight. Yes a torch would have been a bit drastic.

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