RackCorp Cloud Blog

MAY 5TH, 2008
By ADMIN

Power outage on uk-rs-vhost, uk-rs-cs

As reported, on Wednesday, 30/04/08 at 21:36 AEST, the primary datacentre used by RackCorp for all UK equipment suffered a power issue resulting in power being cut to all equipment for a few minutes. The following is the accepted publication of cause by the datacentre:

The nature of the UPS failure was unique according to the manufacturer. There are over 3000 systems of the same model installed worldwide, and not one of these has experienced a similar failure. The failure was extremely unusual and unexpected, and the UPS manufacturer is having an engineer from Switzerland over to examine the failed system in more detail. The manufacturer has not yet determined the exact cause of the fault and as such we are not in a position to update you on what action we will be taking.
When the UPS failed a number of capacitors and other electrical components were overloaded and burnt out, this in turn triggered our fire alarm and all employees were evacuated from the building as part of our standard procedure to ensure their safety. [....]

Their publication goes on to acknowledge that the fire alarm combined with a number of software issues caused further problems with other services operated by them. We’ve had some queries from clients, and can confirm that the ONLY item above that affected any RackCorp client was the power outage itself. Servers were offline for a few minutes, and soon powered back on. Due to the sub-5 minute outage interval, offsite switchover did NOT occur on any RackCorp UK hosted services.

On the up side, we can proudly say that EVERY UK-RS server managed by us booted up in a flawless manner on the day, without incident. All equipment was checked over the following 26hrs by our staff and it is understood that no detectable damage is understood to have occurred to any equipment in use by us or our customers. This result can be attributed to our procedural approach to server management, and many of you have already complimented us on that outcome – so on behalf of the staff who were working on that night we certainly thankyou for your kind feedback.

– NetOps