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.

Comments

Re:More planning could have prevented this

[Hijacked Public]

It is often the case that transformers are kept apart from all other components And that appears to have been the case here. Had you read the article, or even the unusually accurate headline, you would know that the 9,000 servers were 'dropped' rather than 'blown apart'. They are still physically with us, they are just dropped from service because they don't have any power because the power supply blew up.

Further, the 9,000 servers were physically, geographically, isolated enough from the power supply (which is what exploded) to be protected. We know this to be the case because we read the article and headline and understood them and they indicate that the 9,000 servers were not blown up.

To put it another way, only the power supply was damaged by the explosion, the servers were not. Probably there was no way to isolate the power from its own explosion. The servers, however, we protected.

So, in summary, the 9,000 servers were not blown up. Only the power.

The power is off due to the explosion but there servers themselves are A-OK.

Re:Kudo to their support team

[SSpade]

It's little known mostly because it's not actually true. I think you're confusing theplanet with the world, aka world.std.com.