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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."

5 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
  3. Re:First post! by clarkn0va · · Score: 5, Funny

    So Shaw customers get all their disappointment in one fell swoop, while you suffer subclinical abuse on an ongoing basis. Congrats.

    --
    I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
  4. What really happened... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Shaw had a generator overheat and literally blow up which damaged their other 2 generators and caused an electrical arc fire. This fire set off the sprinklers and in turn, the water shut down the backup systems.

    Yes, it was stupid that Shaw housed all their critical systems, including backups, in one building but even more stupid was the fact that they used a water based sprinkler system in a bloody telecom room.

    Also, Alberta has this wonderful thing called Alberta SuperNet, which, if I recall, all health regions use to use before our government decided to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to merge everything together and spend even more money to use the Shaw network to connect everything. The SuperNet was specifically designed with government offices in mind but nooo, why use something you have already paid for when you can spend more money and use something different.

  5. It was so bad.. by Megahard · · Score: 5, Funny

    It caused a stampede.

    --
    I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.