

The Planet faces 24 hours of downtime for 9000 servers in their primary datacenter - e1ven
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185

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herdrick
"Dear Valued Customers:

This evening at 4:55 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 apologize for the impact.

Sincerely,

Douglas J. Erwin Chairman & Chief Executive Officer"

I am not happy.

~~~
reggplant
Can't be helped really as they can't initiate their backup systems because of
the fire departments orders.

I see webfaction is down as a result :/

------
Tichy
"We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on
instructions from the fire department."

That is the interesting bit. So I guess two datacenters in different physical
locations are a necessity as a backup plan.

------
brk
EVERY datacenter eventually suffers outages. Either through acts of stupidity
or nature.

Having all of your eggs in one basket, even if that basket is labelled
"Google" or "Amazon", WILL lead to issues like this.

Also, "leasing" servers will also lead to headaches eventually.

Leased servers, EC2, etc. are all fine while you're in a growth phase, but at
some point if you want to run a big web enterprise, you have to DIY.

------
jncraton
I feel bad for these admins. It's not really their fault, but I'm sure a lot
of end users are going to give them a lot of crap.

------
herdrick
Over 24 hours now.

~~~
ojbyrne
I've got servers up there now.

~~~
ojbyrne
though apparently not with reliable dns yet.

~~~
ojbyrne
To save others some time they put up info on alternate resolvers: NTT
x.ns.verio.net 129.250.35.250

NTT y.ns.verio.net 129.250.35.251

H2 67.15.31.131

H2 66.98.240.131

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