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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.
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
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.