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City's IT Infrastructure Brought To Its Knees By Data Center Outage

Posted by Soulskill on from the watch-out-for-that-first-explosion,-it's-a-doozy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "On July 11th in Calgary, Canada, a fire and explosion was reported at the Shaw Communications headquarters. This took down a large swath of IT infrastructure, including Shaw's telephone and Internet customers, local radio stations, emergency 911 services, provincial services such Alberta Health Services computers, and Alberta Registries. One news site reports that 'The building was designed with network backups, but the explosion damaged those systems as well.' No doubt this has been a hard lesson on how NOT to host critical public services."

4 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Or... by Transdimentia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... it just points out what should be practical thought in that no matter how redundancies you build, you can never escape the (RMS) Titanic effect. So stop claiming stupidity.

  2. No Site Level Resiliency? by sociocapitalist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whoever designed this should be smacked in the head. You never have critical services relying on a single location. Should have redundancy at every level, including geographic (ie not in the same flood / fault / fire zone).

    --
    blindly antisocialist = antisocial
    1. Re:No Site Level Resiliency? by sumdumass · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is why i do not understand the rush to cloud space. The same types of outages that apply to locally hosting the data apply to the cloud space providers. You still need the backup's, disaster plans with the ability to access the servers and such, much of the same stuff if not more then you would need if hosting it yourself. Is the clouds that much cheaper or something? Or is it more about marketing hype that talks PHBs and supervisors who want to sound cool into situations like this where diligence is not necessarily a priority?

    2. Re:No Site Level Resiliency? by ahodgson · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The cloud is not cheaper, unless you're doing things really wrong in the first place, like buying tier 1 servers or running windows.

      It does provide economies of scale, can be somewhat cost-competitive with doing it yourself for at least some things, and you don't have to deal with hardware depreciation and the constant refresh cycle.

      The big cloud providers also integrate a lot of services that would be a pain to build internally for small and mid-sized clients.

      Hype explains the rest. PHBs are always looking for a silver bullet to make things "easy".

      Oh, and developers and managers both think that moving to the cloud means they won't need sysadmins. Only to (eventually) find out that running stuff in the cloud needs sysadmins who not only know how to do everything themselves but can also then work around the cloud providers' idiosyncracies to still build things that work.