San Francisco Power Outage

Tue Jul 24 23:57:34 UTC 2007

On 7/24/07, Seth Mattinen <sethm at rollernet.us> wrote:
>
>
> I have a question: does anyone seriously accept "oh, power trouble" as a
> reason your servers went offline? Where's the generators? UPS? Testing
> said combination of UPS and generators? What if it was important? I
> honestly find it hard to believe anyone runs a facility like that and
> people actually *pay* for it.
>
> If you do accept this is a good reason for failure, why?
>
> ~Seth
>

I'm unable to find a link at the moment, but many moons ago power was lost
at the 350 E Cermak Equinix facility in Chicago. At the time, we didn't have
production equipment there (only a firewall in a shared colo cage/cabinet).
This occured on a Friday evening and lasted for quite some time into
Saturday morning because their generators would start up but would refuse to
continue running. I believe the root cause was a problem related to
insulation on the power cables somewhere. I understand testing is done
frequently, but I'm also aware that if I want full redundancy, I'm going to
have two physically separate locations. There are some events you can't plan
for, as well as failure modes that aren't easily/quickly resolved.

-brandon
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