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A university network brought to its knees when someone inadvertently plugged two network cables into the wrong hub. An employee injured after an ill-timed entry into a data center. Overheated systems shut down after a worker changes a data center thermostat setting from Fahrenheit to Celsius.

Stupid data center tricks. D'oh!

These are just a few of the data center disasters that have been caused not by technological malfunctions or natural catastrophes, but by human error.

According to the Uptime Institute, a New York-based research and consulting organization that focuses on data-center performance, human error causes roughly 70% of the problems that plague data centers today. The group analyzed 4,500 data-center incidents, including 400 full downtime events, says Julian Kudritzki, a vice president at the Uptime Institute, which recently published a set of guidelines for operational sustainability of data centers.

"I'm not surprised," Kudritzki says of the findings. "The management of operations is your greatest vulnerability, but also is a significant opportunity to avoid downtime. The good news is people can be retrained."

Whether it's due to neglect, insufficient training, end-user interference, tight purse strings or simple mistakes, human error is unavoidable. And these days, thanks to the ever-increasing complexity of IT systems -- and the related problem of increasingly overworked data center staffers -- even the mishaps that can be avoided often aren't, says Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc.

Networkworld has the stories HERE!