The Sikh Geek

If you’ve not heard the news then one of Rackspace’s Data Centres has been going through some major problems after a truck crashed into a nearby power transformer. The electricity company then cut the power to the local area, so that the driver could be rescued (fair enough). The nearby Rackspace Dallas Fort Worth Data Centre switched over to its backup power units, except they had been recyling their chiller units at this time. When the auxilliary power came on the chiller units had to be recycled again leaving the Data Centre with 30 minutes of no cooling. The temperature started to rise rapidly and to prevent the place melting down Rackspace started taking servers off-line. This power outage has caused ongoing problems for Rackspace and obviously exposed serious short comings in their systems. One of our customers was effected with their hosted Exchange Server in not being able to connect during the afternoons for an hour or two. There was no warning for Rackspace customer’s that their servers were about to be pulled, Rackspace had to make the decision there and then.

You can read all about it at the Rackspace website and watch the video from the CEO apologising.