Blame Murphy's Law, Excessive Hubris For Blackouts In SF
from the or-blame-the-PR-people,-your-choice dept
Lots of San Francisco-based web sites (Craigslist, Six Apart, Yelp, and Technorati, among others) have been experiencing some problems today, after power outages in the city took down 365 Main, a major hosting facility there. While the power company says it doesn't yet know what's caused the outages, we have a pretty good idea: a 365 Main press release that went out this morning, bragging about the two years of continuous uptime one of its customers has had since moving to the data center. And when these guys invoke Murphy's Law, they don't do it by half, either. The release also brags about the center's "unique billing system in which 365 Main only charges customers for the exact amount of power that is used" -- so presumably today will be free. But what really sealed their fate was this paragraph:"To ensure uptime for key tenants such as RedEnvelope, 365 Main provides modern power and cooling infrastructure. The company's San Francisco facility includes two complete back-up systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss. In the unlikely event of a cut to a primary power feed, the state-of-the-art electrical system instantly switches to live back-up generators, avoiding costly downtime for tenants and keeping the data center continuously running."Good to see those backup systems are working!
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Filed Under: data centers
Companies: 365 main, redenvelope
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Drunk and disorderly... ?
http://valleywag.com/tech/breakdowns/a-drunk-employee-kills-all-of-the-websites-you-care-abo ut-282021.php
In that article it says that a "shitfaced drunk" employee did the damage to 40+ racks of equipment.
I dunno, but I think I'll take that article with a grain of salt for the time being.
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Rats
Russia's Baikonur Kosmodrome also had a serious problem with rats chewing cables at the time, and they dealt with the problem by keeping cats.
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Murphy's Law - a correction
Quoted from The Signature of God by John Dalmas
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Could be related. =)
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Bragging like that is almost as stupid as...
Moral: God doesn't like braggers.
BMR777
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Re: Excessive Hubris
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Re:
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Duh...
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That wasn't Murphy's Law...
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Excessive BS is more like it
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well duh!
(emphasis mine)
The power goes out and they trust on electrical systems to switch to back up generators?
No wonder it went wrong. :-)
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Re: well duh!
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Re: well duh!
Something clearly went wrong however. I had a client once who had a similar failure, the batteries switched over to the generator which started just fine and all was OK, but a few minutes later the generator stopped
Cause: whichever plank had installed the generator had wired up its electric diesel pump to the mains only, instead of to the generators own electrical output.... it drank itself dry ;0)
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Murphy was an optimist
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Askign for it.
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No mirroring?
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backups?
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you think you're so smart...
No batteries, no redundant grid, no amount of testing will guarantee a no-impact failover. I've seen multiple outages at multiple sites over 20 years. The answer is IT DEPENDS. With hugs power feeds it gets complicated fast.
It is incredibly ironic that the PR folks put out a release like that the same day... but really, most hosting sites say the same kinds of things. You can take cheap shots if you want, doesn't mean you know anything. I often enjoy the hubris of the media!
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reply
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