Power Problems Force Seattle To Throttle City Data Center For Days 85
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."
Re:Looking to move to Seattle... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:2.1 million? What? (Score:4, Informative)
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.