Posted on by Clem Maloney

Flood Recovery and Secondary Server Room Implementation

Description

Flood Recovery and Secondary Server Room Implementation

Sector: Professional Services
Service: IT Resourcing & Delivery Oversight
Objective: Insource specialist contractors to lead recovery after a server room flood, implement temporary infrastructure, and establish a resilient secondary server room.

Context

A mid-sized organisation suffered a critical incident when its primary server room was flooded, threatening business continuity and risking long-term equipment damage. The event compromised servers, patch panels, UPS units, and other infrastructure. While insurance covered replacement hardware, leadership needed rapid recovery to restore services — and oversight to ensure the rebuild created a more resilient environment.

The challenge extended beyond data restoration. Corrosion risk meant patch panels had to be replaced, while the business required both an interim solution and a permanent uplift to guard against future disruptions.

Approach

123.EXPERT applied its delivery-focussed insourcing model, engaging two specialist contractors with expertise in disaster recovery, infrastructure deployment, and vendor coordination. Acting under structured delivery oversight, the team:

  • Recovered data from compromised servers, ensuring integrity and continuity of operations.

  • Replaced patch panels pre-emptively to mitigate corrosion risks.

  • Established a temporary server room to provide short-term stability during the recovery period.

  • Coordinated with vendors to procure and configure new servers, patch panels, UPS units, and supporting hardware.

  • Converted a utility room into a secondary server room, deploying secondary Windows domain controllers for resilience.

  • Implemented storage replication between server rooms to protect against future hardware or site failures.

  • Installed a 10Gb backbone interconnect between the two rooms, ensuring performance and redundancy.

Impact

Business services were restored rapidly, minimising downtime despite the scale of the incident. The new dual-server-room configuration provided improved resilience, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery capability.

By engaging 123.EXPERT to insource contractors under a delivery-oversight model, the organisation achieved both immediate recovery and a forward-looking infrastructure uplift. The result was not just restoration, but a significantly stronger foundation for operational continuity.