The flooding brought by Cyclone Gabrielle

Our hearts and thoughts are with all those who have lost loved ones, houses, possessions, crops, stock, land etc. to the flooding brought by Cyclone Gabrielle! The devastation that it caused is massive and will take a very long time to get over. We wish you all the best and hope you can overcome this massive disaster and once again prosper.

At ProcessIT we were luckily very fortunate, with our office being in Hastings we didn’t get flooded but merely suffered some minor ponding of water and a couple of downed trees. One of our staff could no longer get to work due to the road outages and also suffered from the extended Electricity outage. Thank goodness for gas barbeques!

Hawke’s Bay generally was extremely lucky most of stop banks held and kept the torrents within their confines. The few breaches that occurred were disastrous to those downstream. Below are two photos I took in awe of the amount and power of water…

The Ngaruroro River and cycle track on top of the stop-bank behind the “Dog Park”

The Chesterhope Bridge, Pakowhai.

Power and Communications Outage

It was / is truly amazing how much we all depend on these modern technologies. Everyone missed the communications networks and the Internet with the power down and no way to find out just what was going on or what was happening around them (few have a Transistor Radio anymore). Very isolating and scary for many.

As the clean up continues and the soon to start rebuild kicks off, we wish every one the best going forward and trust that lesson will be learnt and improvements will be made so New Zealand will not be subjected to this level of damage again.

Tech Tip

You may recall that in a previous newsletter we discussed our business continuity strategy. Fortunately our strategy worked well for us in the flooding brought by Cyclone Gabrielle, with our fibre internet connection, phone line and Wi-Fi all continuing without fail until our power was restored! -Phew! How you may ask? The answer is that our UPS’s worked as planned and kept everything running.

UPS or Uninterruptable Power Supplies.

These devices contain backup batteries and plug into the 240V wall outlet. Then you plug your computer and / or other devices into the UPS. When the Mains fails the Batteries kick in and the UPS generates the 240V you need to keep your critical equipment running. Additionally, most offer inbuilt surge protection to save your Critical Devices from those nasty voltage spikes and brownouts! read about UPS’s on Wikipedia.

The UPS that protects our Fibre Modem, the VoIP “Landline” and our Wi-Fi worked like a charm and kept all this equipment running for the duration of the power outage here.

As most of the Communication network providers use Battery backups on their network equipment, I strongly recommend you should install a UPS for your Modem to maintain your network connectivity to the outside world in such an emergency situation.

While our business is Software Development, our technical experts at ProcessIT can also help you with your UPS planning and purchase too. These can start from as little as $145 (including GST) for a small UPS that will run your modem for around an hour or two, or a Computer for a few minutes (to enable you to save your work and shutdown safely) to massive systems that can run rooms full of computers.

Going forward if you think you need a Battery backed-up UPS System just reply or Contact us to discuss your requirements, options and protect your devices from power outages.

Until next time Stay Safe and DRY!