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Power Problems Force Seattle To Throttle City Data Center For Days
Nerval's Lobster writes with an except from sister site SlashDataCenter: "On Aug. 23, Mayor Mike McGinn of Seattle informed residents that the city would partially shut down its municipal data center for five days including the Labor Day weekend. As a result, city residents will be unable to pay bills, apply for business licenses, or take advantage of other online services. In a Webcast press conference, McGinn isolated the issue as a failure in one of the electrical 'buses' that supplies power to the data center. Because that piece of equipment began overheating, the city had to begin taking servers and applications offline to prevent overloading the system. The maintenance will cost the city $2.1 million of its maintenance budget. A second power bus will remain operational, supplying enough electricity to power redundant systems for critical life and fire safety systems, including 911 services and fire dispatch. The city's Web sites should also be up and running in some capacity."
That should help the situation.
They have the power, they just can't get it where they need it without equipment overheating. Since it is a busbar overheating you can't just switch over to emergency power to fix it, you have to route power around the issue which is not economically feasible in this case except for the emergency services systems which can use their redundant power supplies.
sudo mod me up
I live south of Seattle, and work in the city.
Any political gridlock is largely because current Mayor McGinn is a joke. Seattle is a fairly liberal city, but McGinn was largely seen as too extremely left-wing to be electable even there; so he remade himself into a pragmatist - a change that lasted until he was sworn in. McGinn made specific promises pre-election that he wouldn't let his personal ideology affect policies where the citizenry clearly differed from him... then he turned around and spent most of his time fighting ideological political battles, ignoring real problems while devoting 100% of his time tilting at his personal windmills.
#DeleteChrome
What I'm trying to figure out is why 911 and emergency services didn't have a separate offsite backup. I mean, how much more mission critical can you get than that? Everytime I see one of these articles I think to myself: Why are they mentioning this if there wasn't some risk of failure? And the answer is... because quite obviously, there was some risk.
I don't want my cause of death to be "Your call could not be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try your call again later..."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The city of Seattle, or any modern city, needs exactly three modern servers to provide their public services. And two of them are to provide redundancy for the one that does the actual work. Internally they may need more servers for VDI or some such, or need to physically isolate one service from another. But one modern server is adequate to provide all of the public services Seattle provides, and two more provide geographic redundancy through their fiber network, which could be upgraded to 100 Gig for a reasonable cost because they own the fiber and the endpoints. The devil is in the I/O, and SSD takes care of that.
But I can't tell them that. I sell their multitudinous departments a lot of servers.
Seattle has great parking. You can park your car on I5 for several hours each day without concern that traffic might move forward while you're shopping.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The datacenter is on the 26th floor of the municipal tower and the overheating bus runs up to that floor. The power company in question is municipally owned, either way it would be the city's problem.