The Planet H1 Data Center Outage caused 9000 servers to go down

The Planet H1 Data Center Outage has caused 9,000 servers to go down affecting 7,500 customers and I was one of the unlucky one.

It all started at 4:55pm CDT 31st May 2008 (Singapore time 5:55am 1st June 2008) and I was unable to do anything except waiting for their updates and pray that they could get the servers up as soon as possible. No Estimated Time of Recovery was given.

Here is the official email I received from The Planet CEO Douglas J. Erwin

Dear Valued Customers:

This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and apologize for the impact.

Sincerely,

Douglas J. Erwin
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Popularity: 3% [?]

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!