Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Unsinkable Data Center Crashes in Seattle

I have to thank the boss for this link. Check out an article at E-Commerce Times about a Data Center in Seattle that crashed on July 30th due to a "string of malfunctions in the facility's electrical power system."

I continue to think back to what makes people decide on location when picking a data center for their infrastructure. Brown-outs in Texas, power issues in Seattle, hurricanes in the south.... and yet these mega Data Centers still go up in these places.

Anwyay....it is a very good article with a time-line of events that surrounded the outage.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Fisher's problems are related to Fisher, not Seattle. Seattle is an excellent location for a facility. Power costs are probably the lowest of any major metro area, as are cooling costs. The ambient temp here is pretty universally "cool"... summertime highs in the mid-70s, winter highs in the 40s.

Fisher's isssues seem to be from mixing redundancy and failover in the design. You will note that Seattle City Light says that there was NO grid failure the day that Fisher had their outage, so who knows what caused them to go to backup power. But once the gensets kicked on, the switch to get power from them failed to switch. I know some folks in the biz who are located at Fisher, and they've yet to see a real comprehensive RFO to date, so who knows what is *really* going on up there.