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What's Happening to the power ?
Power Supplies fail in San Francisco - Power Cut shuts down websites
Some of the web's biggest names were unavailable yesterday after a major data centre lost power in San Francisco .
Ironically the incident happened on the same day the data centre, 365 Main, distributed a release touting "two complete backup systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss."
Craigslist, the classified advertising site, Typepad, the blogging platform, and Second Life, the virtual world, were among those affected when a data centre in central San Fransisco was left without power.
Most of the sites which went down, were back up after some hours, but not before millions of users tried and failed to access them during the early afternoon, local time.
"At approximately 1.45pm, the 365 Main San Francisco data centre experienced a massive power outage."
The Pacific Gas & Electric Company confirmed that 40,000 San Francisco businesses and residents were affected by power fluctuations caused by an open circuit breaker. It said that it was still investigating what caused the fault, which took two hours to rectify.
Ironically the incident happened on the same day the data centre, 365 Main, distributed a release touting "two complete backup systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss."
Craigslist, the classified advertising site, Typepad, the blogging platform, and Second Life, the virtual world, were among those affected when a data centre in central San Fransisco was left without power.
Most of the sites which went down, were back up after some hours, but not before millions of users tried and failed to access them during the early afternoon, local time.
"At approximately 1.45pm, the 365 Main San Francisco data centre experienced a massive power outage."
The Pacific Gas & Electric Company confirmed that 40,000 San Francisco businesses and residents were affected by power fluctuations caused by an open circuit breaker. It said that it was still investigating what caused the fault, which took two hours to rectify.
"It was right in the middle of the US workday, so it was very bad for us," Derek Gordon, an executive at Technorati told the LA Times.
"It exposed a larger vulnerability," Mr Gordon added. "If this could happen to such a collection of major websites, what would happen if this was part of a major catastrophe? This was sort of a wake-up call."
Lesson to be learned is the underlining the importance that such centres should be able to cope with occasional outages, why didn't standby generators support the existing uninterruptible power supplies ?
Why did N+1 redundancy already installed? Of course had there been N+2 redundancy backed up by N+2 S tandby generators then there wouldn't have been a power issue.
Summary from Information published in the LA Times Jan 2008
Learn more about disaster prevention and power protection by clicking on the highlighted words.
"It exposed a larger vulnerability," Mr Gordon added. "If this could happen to such a collection of major websites, what would happen if this was part of a major catastrophe? This was sort of a wake-up call."
Lesson to be learned is the underlining the importance that such centres should be able to cope with occasional outages, why didn't standby generators support the existing uninterruptible power supplies ?
Why did N+1 redundancy already installed? Of course had there been N+2 redundancy backed up by N+2 S tandby generators then there wouldn't have been a power issue.
Summary from Information published in the LA Times Jan 2008
Learn more about disaster prevention and power protection by clicking on the highlighted words.
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