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Car Hits Utility Pole, Takes Out EC2 Datacenter
1sockchuck writes "An Amazon cloud computing data center lost power Tuesday when a vehicle struck a nearby utility pole. When utility power was lost, a transfer switch in the data center failed to properly manage the shift to backup power. Amazon said a "small number" of EC2 customers lost service for about an hour, but the downtime followed three power outages last week at data centers supporting EC2 customers. Tuesday's incident is reminiscent of a 2007 outage at a Dallas data center when a truck crash took out a power transformer."
And, as a result, Farmville/Mafiawars updates on Facebook temporarily stop.
Nothing of value was lost.
Kriston
"The cloud" doesn't solve everything. Film at 11.
Amazon for not load-testing their emergency backup power on a regular basis, not having more than one connection the power grid, and the power grid for not having redundancies. Our aging power grid is really beginning to show on so many levels that this is going to become a lot more common over the coming years.
"There might be intelligent beings created by God in outer space even if there are none here on Earth." -Anonymous
Utility poles clearly need countermeasures. Hellfire missiles and such. That'll teach 'em to mess with a poor defenseless pole.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Seriously, Amazon screwed up in a fairly major way with this.
What more upsetting is this: If Amazon doesn't have working disaster recovery, what do other websites/companies have?
Answer: Nothing. You'd be surprised how may US small-to-medium sized business are one fire/tornado/earthquake/hurricane away from bankruptcy. I'd bet it's over 80% of them.
The classic in my last job was when we had a security contractor in on the weekend hooking something up and he looped off a hot breaker in the computer room, slipped, and shorted the white phase to ground. This blew the 100A fuses both before and after the UPS and somehow caused the generator set to fault so that while we had power from the batteries, that was all we had.
It also blew the power supply on an alphaserver and put a nice burn mark in the breaker panel. So the UPS guy comes out and he doesn't have two of the right sort of fuse. Fortunately 100A fuses are just strips of steel with two holes drilled in them and he had a file, and a drill, etc. So we got going in the end.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This is why I long ago resolved to never, ever, ever correct someone else's grammar on slashdot. The risk in inadvertently failing to grammar is unacceptable.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I expect this is just a scaled up version of the problems I deal with every day. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Users have grown so dependent on system services and management has grown so apart from the trenches that completely unreasonable expectations are the norm. Where I work for instance it's almost impossible to even *test* backup power and failover mechanisms and procedures because users consider even minor outages in the middle of the night unacceptable and managers either don't have the clout or don't understand the problem well enough to put limits to such expectations. As a result often times the only tests such systems get happen during real emergencies, when they are actually needed. I don't know how, but I feel we should start educating our users and managers better, not to mention being realistic about risks and expectations.
Why couldn't they just get power from the cloud?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
All a fuse is is a piece of metal that will melt fairly quickly when a given amount of current is passed through it. Idea being that it heats up and melts before the wires can. So, the bigger the current, the more robust the metal connecting it. A 100A fuse is usually a fairly large strip of steel.
Now I'll admit that just grabbing an approximate size of steel and placing it in as the GP did isn't going to yield a nice precise fuse. It may have been too high a current. However, it'd work for getting things running again and probably provide a modicum of protection in the event of a short.
Often, mods will give a funny post "insightful" instead of "funny" because it gives the user positive karma (whereas funny does not affect karma). Not a use intended by CmdrTaco, I'd imagine, but it's a common practice.
What about your power supply? Is that not allowed to go along a road? I am all for underground power BTW but I know that if you operate a digger and you want to find the owner of a cable the easiest way is to break it and wait for the complaints.
That's also the fastest way to get rescued off a desert island or out in the woods, and why you should always carry a piece of fiber in your pocket. Should you get stranded, you simply bury the fiber, and some asshole with a backhoe will be along in about five minutes to cut it. Ask him to rescue you.
John
Redundancy costs money. If it costs more than downtime, you don't get it.
Sent from my PDP-11
For years, I co-located at the top-rated 365 Main data center in San Francisco, CA until they had a power failure a few years ago. Despite having 5x redundant power that was regularly tested, it apparently wasn't tested against a *brown out*. So when Pacific Gas and Electric had a brownout, it failed to trigger 2 of the 5 redundant generators. Unfortunately, the system was designed so that any *one* of the redundant generators could fail and there wouldn't be any problem.
So power was in a brownout condition, the voltage dropped from the usual 120 volts or so down to 90. Many power supplies have brownout detectors and will shut off. Many did, until the total system load dropped to the point where normal power was restored. All of this happened within a few seconds, and the brownout was fixed in just a few minutes. But at the end of it all, there was perhaps 20% of all the systems in the building shut down. The "24x7 hot hands" were beyond swamped. Techies all around the San Francisco area were pulled from whatever they were doing to converge on downtown SF. And me, 4 hours drive away, managed to restore our public-facing services on the one server (of four) I had that survived the voltage spikes before driving in. (Alas, my servers had the "higher end" power supplies with brownout detection)
And so it was a long chain of almost success of well-tested, high-quality equipment that failed all in sequence because real life didn't happen to behave like the frequently performed tests did.
When I did finally arrive, the normally quiet, meticulously clean facility was a shambles. Littered with bits of network cable, boxes of freshly-purchased computer equipment, pizza boxes, and other refuge were to be found in every corner. The aisles were crowded with techies performing disk checks and chattering tersely on cell phones. It was other-worldly.
All of my systems came up normally; simply pushing the power switch and letting the fsck run did the trick, we were fully back up and all tests performed (and the system configuration returned to normal) in about an hour.
Upon reflection, I realized that even though I had some down time, I was really in a pretty good position:
1) I had backup hosting elsewhere, with a backup from the previous night. I could have switched over, but decided not to because we had current data on one system and we figured it was better not to have anybody lose any data than to have everybody lose the morning's work.
2) I had good quality equipment; the fact that none of my equipment was damaged from the event may have been partly due to the brownout detection in the power supplies of my servers.
3) At no point did I have any less than two backups off site in two different location, so I had multiple, recent data snapshots off site. As long as the daisy chains of failure can be, it would be freakishly rare to have all of these points go down at once.
4) Even with 75% of my hosting capacity taken offline, we were able to maintain uptime throughout all this because our configuration has full redundancy within our cluster - everything is stored in at least 2 places onsite.
Moral of the story? Never, EVER have all your eggs in one basket.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Funny thing, I thought "cloud" computing means that you're placed into an automatically redundant network of machines, so if there's a site wide outage it didn't interfere with the operations.
Now I see that Amazon's definition of "cloud" simply means "hosting provider". I guess in this case it means hosting provider with no DC power room, N+1 generators and regular testing to ensure the fallback systems actually work.
That kind of reminds me of a company (who will remain nameless) who did tape backups, but never verified their tapes. When the data was lost, a good percentage of the tapes didn't work.
I worked near a good datacenter. Out on smoke breaks late at night, you could hear them test fire their generators once a week. I was in there helping someone one night during a thunderstorm that sounded like it would rip the roof off, when I heard the generators spin up. The inside of the datacenter didn't miss a beat. When I left an hour later, I saw that there was no power (street lights, traffic lights, and normally illuminated buildings) for about 1/2 mile around it. The power company had it fixed by morning though. When I came back in the morning, everything was fine. Well, except my workstation in the office that didn't have redundant power.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
When was the last time anyone heard of a TV Network going dark for an hour? A Hospital Emergency Room? IT guys always run around like self-important Star Trek Blue Shirts, but they never seem to take the proper steps to ensure -- really ensure -- their uptime.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but it just seems that they have a ways to go, compared to the real "critical systems" industries to which they are so fond of comparing themselves. Is it money, arrogance, or ignorance?
When was the last time anyone heard of a TV Network going dark for an hour?
Hmm, let me think. How about yesterday?