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:5 days no government, is that so bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
911 and emergency services (Score:5, Insightful)
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..."