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

[Jesus_666]

Building an orphanage into the server room was unforgivable as well. All those children who were burnt crisp when the entire datacenter erupted in a huge mushroom cloud...

Re:Ignorant firemen = single point-of-failure

[evilviper]

You sound a lot like the ignorant frigtards in the recent Summit Wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mtns. of CA that were upset when a chief wouldn't send his crews up to save their homes (they had already evacuated safely)

Not trying to feed a troll or slander any firefighters, but I would have more sympathy for the chief if they would STOP telling people, at every opportunity, that they should (and later, ordering them to) all evacuate their homes and leave everything to the fire dept., rather than staying behind and trying to protect their property.

Personally, I got to watch as fire fighters sat on the bumpers of their trucks for a good 4+ hours, letting a small brush fire (that two men could have put out with shovels) burn towards homes, and horribly pollute the air for 20 miles around with thick ash. I was absolutely mystified at their utter inaction, until I heard an announcement on the radio that the fire depts. were asking for donations from all the surrounding towns... Good work men!

What's more, the area home-owners were all under mandatory evacuation orders for the entire time the dept. was extorting "donations" and other hand-outs for their crews. Additionally, because we have a fire dept., the police will stop all private citizens from approaching the area of the fire, and the possibility of a non-official fire-fighter putting the damn thing out with a garden hose...

But my biggest criticism of fire fighters is how utterly helpless they are in the face of forest fires. A fire hose may be able to put out a burning couch in 5 seconds flat, but up against a raging wild inferno, it's like spitting into a bonfire. What fire fighters really need is not water and fire retardant, but chain saws and bulldozers so they can actually make a decent fire break and stop a forest fire dead, far faster than back-burning, and no risk of loss of control. And don't bother telling me that bulldozers can't operate on an incline... Many millions have been spent to retrofit a 747 to carry fire retardant, it would be far less difficult or expensive to pivot-mount a bulldozer's engine, or even opt for an aircraft turbine (that can handle any angle) instead of pistons.