City's IT Infrastructure Brought To Its Knees By Data Center Outage 102
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."
First post! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No Site Level Resiliency? (Score:2, Informative)
The issue is IBM runs the Alberta Health Services and other infrastructure from the Shaw building of which IBM has their own datacenter in. IBM had no proper backups in place for these services.
911 being the most critical was also not affected, just Shaw VoIP users couldn't call 911 if their lines were down -- obviously (only ~20k people downtown were affected).
Not surprising (Score:3, Informative)
There are buildings all over the US that can have a similar effect but worse. In Seattle it would be the Westin Tower, get the two electrical vaults in that building and you'll pretty much take most phone service, internet service and various emergency agency services all over the state offline for a while.
What I now consider a classic example is the outage of Fischer plaza. It not only took down credit card processors, bing travel and a couple other big online services. It also took out Verizon's FiOS service for western washington.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/03/major-outage-at-seattle-data-center/
(apologies don't comment a lot and don't know how to properly link)
The big problem is that many services no matter how redundant they may seem to be, now-in-days have a upstream geographic single point of failure (Ala my Westin tower example.)