Power - The Theme of Data Center Outages

As soon as I finished my last rant (See, Infrastructure Failure - Be Paranoid), a reader pointed out a similar incident close to home, at Fisher Plaza in Seattle.

Fisher Plaza is considered to be a premium data center housing numerous high profile clients and ten different telecom carriers bringing fiber to the buildings. I visit the facility time-to-time as several customers are co-located there.

It seems Fisher Plaza experienced an outage due to electrical power equipment failure few weeks ago knocking KOMO TV and KOMO 1000 News Radio stations offline (See, Unsinkable Data Center Crashes in Seattle). There were also several similar incidents reported in other cities (See, Data Center Outages Bring Headaches, Headlines and InterNAPPing?)

The moral of these incidents for customers are very simple:

• There is no 100% uptime SLA. Anyone who promises you this is smoking something they shouldn't be. In a AFCOM survey, 20% had been hit with at least five failures in past five years (See, Five Predictions: 9 of 10 Companies Face Failures)
  

• When planning mission critical operations, look beyond just redundant power supplies, UPS and WAN connections. Facility is as important as your equipment in keeping your operations up. "Many data centers just can't handle new technologies coming out," Comment by a presenter at AFCOM Data Center World Conference (See, Five Predictions: Relocations and Outsourcing)
  

• Perform due diligence not only on tenant happiness and satisfaction but also crisis handling and management.
  

• Murphy's Law is alive and kicking even for well planned, thought out, mission critical activities.