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Multiple Sites Down In SF Power Outage

Posted by kdawson on from the or-was-it-a-drunk dept.

corewtfux writes with word of a major outage apparently centered on 365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District. Valleywag initially claimed that a drunken person had gotten in and damaged 40 racks, but an update from Technorati's Dave Sifry says the problem is a widespread power outage. Sites affected include Technorati, Netflix (these display nice "We're Dead" pages), Typepad, LiveJournal, Sun.com, and Craigslist (these just time out).

5 of 423 comments (clear)

  1. Redundant? by DogDude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't these large sites have failover capable, redundant servers in multiple physical locations? Why should a failure in one rack, one room, or heck, even one state for the giant sites, effect them?

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    1. Re:Redundant? by raehl · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm certainly forwarding this article to my boss, who abruptly decided to put an end to planning for a backup site on the basis of "aw, nothing is going to happen".

      The thing is, letting something happen may be a better decision than trying to stop it.

      If you're going to have a fully-redundant setup, it's going to cost you twice as much as having just one setup. And if you're not going to have a fully-redundant setup, your backup site is going to buckle under the full load of normal traffic anyway.

      The correct business decision might just be "I just saved a bunch of money on my data center insurance," and if you lose a day's business, oh well, that was still cheaper than keeping a backup data center around.

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      paintball
  2. Re:No Generators? by eln · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Any data center that advertises high availability should be testing that sort of thing on a regular basis. It's possible that they could fail switchover even if they are being regularly tested, but it is unlikely.

    If the "power outage" theory is correct and the "drunken employee" theory is incorrect, as a customer I'd be pissed that the data center I pay tons of money to can't keep my site up in the event of a power outage, which is one of the main perks of hosting at a data center in the first place.

  3. Re:No Generators? by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the "power outage" theory is correct and the "drunken employee" theory is incorrect, as a customer...

    For me it would be other way around. A technology failure I could understand. Letting a drunk employee near my server rack, I could not.

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    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  4. Re:No Generators? by Not+The+Real+Me · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "...I would think these large sites are going to pitch a bitch..."

    I would think these large sites would understand the concept of not putting all your eggs (servers) in one basket. There is a reason why smart companies use replication and clustering, and datacenters spread across the country.