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Explosion At ThePlanet Datacenter Drops 9,000 Servers
An anonymous reader writes "Customers hosting with ThePlanet, a major Texas hosting provider, are going through some tough times. Yesterday evening at 5:45 pm local time an electrical short caused a fire and explosion in the power room, knocking out walls and taking the entire facility offline. No one was hurt and no servers were damaged. Estimates suggest 9,000 servers are offline, affecting 7,500 customers, with ETAs for repair of at least 24 hours from onset. While they claim redundant power, because of the nature of the problem they had to go completely dark. This goes to show that no matter how much planning you do, Murphy's Law still applies." Here's a Coral CDN link to ThePlanet's forum where staff are posting updates on the outage. At this writing almost 2,400 people are trying to read it.
ahahaha
sweet job reading troll. you didn't even need to read all those big words. here's a bunch of tiny words (they happened to be at the end of his post so you couldn't miss them)
> So, in summary, the 9,000 servers were not blown up. Only the power.
yeah, I know, I'm being a prick right now, but I've got karma to burn and people who don't read piss me off
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
You forget that part of your job description is to protect property. It can't always be running in to save the cute blond kid who got left behind in the panic to evacuate the home.
And yes, that means that sometimes firefighters are expected to risk their life to save just a building and prevent that fire from spreading to other empty buildings. If there wasn't a point where we expected firefighters to take an acceptable risk, we would just evacuate a town when a fire started, wait for everything to burn down in absolute safety, then rebuild.
And yet, I personally have seen a fire break out at a self-storage facility and watched four firecrews sit there and watch the entire structure (with I remind you countless family's personal possessions and sentimental collectibles) burn to the ground. Why? Because the fire chief thought there might be one person there storing ammunition and he wasn't going to risk anyone to stop the fire.
To me that's complete cowardice. If that was the job some firefighters think they are supposed to do, I want my taxes back. I can hire a $8/hr security guard to cordone off an area and wait for a fire to burn itself out. We pay someone $98K plus benefits to actually try to stop the fire even if there is a eensy chance that something could hurt him.
You point out that anything can happen at any time. Ditto for firefighters. You could get into an accident on the way to the scene. So why not just stay there in the safety of the firehouse if there are no lives at stake?
Electricians have to work with LIVE power on a routine basis. Nobody apparently gives a shit if an electrician has to risk death because they don't want to have to power down their racks while he replaces a fuse or adds a new circuit. And I have electrician friends that have the scar tissue to prove that it doesn't always turn out well.
Risk management. Do I want to see a firefighter die so that my customer can get his email today instead of tomorrow? Of course not. But do I think it makes any sense to have 9000+ people and all the systems they may depend upon go down because the fire chief doesn't think his employees can resisted clutching every exposed wire they run across?
I obviously never expected that an entire facility with redundant power supplies would lose power. Whoops, yes, my bad but I assure you I can't be the only one who never thought this was a likely possibility. I've never seen "Fireman independant power systems" advertised as a selling feature when shopping for server hosting. Maybe someone will see a market opportunity, I don't know.
But I expect that people who are paid to minimize damage to property will MINIMIZE damage, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The problem was clearly with high voltage. So cut the feed from the power company, case closed. Shutting down the redundant power generators that are DOWNSTREAM from the problem? That's idiotic. It's right up there with the voodoo and witchcraft method of personal protection.
Neither of us are right, dude. But the point is that I've never heard of generators being ordered off when the whole point of having generators is to provide power when the main fails. So this completely bugs me and I'm skeptical it has anything to do with erring way too far on the side of caution. Otherwise, what's next:
"Say chief, I know we have all these people in this hospital on life support, but someone left a cigarette in a trash can and I'd sure as heckfire feel safer if we just shut the whole things down"
-JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
firefighter != electrician
Electricians don't work in areas where an explosion just happened and some wires may or may not be live.
Both, electricians and firefighters would shut down the power. Electricians may take their time to understand the situation. Firefighter have no time. So in case of fire and shit, firefighters will demand power is shut down before going in, especially in cases of ELECTRICAL FIRE!!
How stupid can you be? Electricity was what fueled the explosion and/or fire! So you shut it off! All of it. You don't know what is its state, so you shut it down. You know, electricity "flows" from one end of a transformer to another *both* ways. And hell, I would not trust some relay switch with my life after an explosion. Hell, the railing or stairs or support column could be live and who the hell knows what is live and what is not??
You are like some idiot bitching that there their natural gas supplies were cut because there was an underground pipe explosion 2 miles down from your house.