They Dug a Hole in a Running Data Center | Fire, Flood & Blood

A cracked floor tile. A massive hole. A soldier holding up a rack carrying an entire military base’s communications. What could possibly go wrong? Recorded live at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome returning guest Jeremy Wright for another edition of Fire, Flood & Blood, where IT practitioners share their unforgettable stories from the field. Jeremy takes us back to 2007, working as a civilian sysadmin on a U.S. military base in Iraq. An attempt to repair cracked tiles turned into excavation beneath a running data center, leaving a critical communications rack dangerously close to collapse. And that wasn’t the only challenge: an Abrams tank took out aerial fiber, and torrential rain poured onto server racks. It’s a memorable reminder that infrastructure reliability depends on more than the equipment inside the rack. Chapters: 00:00 Welcome to Fire, Flood & Blood 00:48 VMware Explore and access to the experts 02:14 Working as a sysadmin in Iraq 03:22 The signal unit and an unexpected leadership role 04:46 “You need to come over to the data center” 05:35 Cracked tiles and a fragile foundation 06:17 Floor repairs put critical communications at risk 07:56 Stabilizing the rack and filling the hole 09:02 When an Abrams tank takes out your fiber 09:20 Restoring communications in a combat zone 10:11 Flood: Rain pouring onto the racks 11:05 Share your own Fire, Flood & Blood story Have a Fire, Flood & Blood story of your own? Tell us in the comments. Catch all episodes on the VMware Cloud Foundation YouTube channel. #VirtuallySpeaking #VMwareExplore #DataCenter #SysAdmin