June 01, 2008, 03:04:51 PM
ThePlanet.com is a huge series of data centers that host thousands of servers. This was in just one of their Houston data centers and they also have DCs in the Dallas area. Yesterday they had a transformer explode that took out 3 walls and power to more than 9,000 servers. Fortunately none of the servers appeared to be physically damaged, but until power gets restored they're basically paperweights.
It's a good reminder that even if your host keeps their own backups, you need to be keeping a set too.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/01/the_planet_houston_data_center_fire/Fire at The Planet takes down thousands of websites
Faulty transformer blamed
A fire at The Planet's H1 data center in Houston, Texas on Saturday has taken out thousands of websites.
In messages posted on the web hosting firm's forum, the company blamed a faulty transformer for the fire. No servers or networking equipment were damaged, but the data centre remains without power, after The Planet shut down all generators "as instructed by the fire department.
About 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers are affected by the outage. B3ta.com, a popular British comedy site, is a high profile casualty.
The Planet is posting hourly updates on its forum. It has five other data centers, which remain up and running.
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185 From Doug Erwin:
This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.
We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.
This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.
We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.
There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.
I am sorry that this accident has occurred and I apologize for the impact.
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