Weathering the Superstorm Together

Superstorm Sandy left devastation in its wake from the Caribbean all the way up to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast corridor of the US. All of us at Dell want to offer our thoughts and prayers to the families and businesses caught in storm’s destructive path. The news is filled with stories of tragic loss, but equally of the heroic efforts of people and communities helping one another during and after the epic storm.

In times like these, Dell rallies around our customers and communities to do our part to contribute by helping devastated communities recover. During the storm, we took precautions to ensure the continuity of business to our customers and now, in the storm’s aftermath, we are supporting the Red Cross in its disaster relief efforts through matching our employees’ charitable contributions. There have been countless heroes and heroines that stepped up during this crisis, and we’d like to call out a couple of our very own.

As the ravaging storm whirled up the New Jersey coast, the storm’s gale force winds cause pervasive power outages. Our New Jersey-based Dell cloud data center was not immune. A power surge from the street knocked out an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) and ultimately a transfer switch, instantly shutting down the data center operations. Robert Stogner, Dell System Administrator, leapt into action with colleague Richard Boyle, Facilities Management Advisor. The team quickly diagnosed the problem and recovered the data center using back-up generator power. Their expertise and ongoing operations monitoring mitigated the impact of a material outage that paralyzed scores of less fortunate businesses and homes.

Richard’s and Robert’s tireless efforts during the storm and its reverberations resulted in restoring operations to thousands of providers that deliver patient care to people in the local communities and across the US.  Without the availability of these critical physician practice systems, clinics would have been forced to shut down and needed patient care would have been unavailable. Thanks to Robert and Richard, our Dell physician cloud solution literally “weathered” the ferocious storm with minimal customer impact.

To help in similar emergencies, Dell supported the first-ever American Red Cross Digital Operations Center. This social listening center was created to engage the public during emergencies and connect people with the resources they need. We encourage those in affected areas to follow the American Red Cross Twitter stream here. Take a look at Kevin Carrillo's post on the #DellSolves blog for more insight. 

All of us at Dell are honored to serve our customers and community. Together, we will weather this storm.

About the Author: Nnamdi Orakwue