Power Surge KOs Washington State Data Center

Data Center Knowledge (Sep 7 2011) Data Center Outages

1. A power surge crashed the state’ of Washington’s s primary data center in Olympia last month, according to local media reports. The Aug. 21 outage occurred as a new high-voltage power line was being added to expand the power capacity of the office campus. During the installation, an electrical switch in an underground vault short-circuited. The equipment failure resulted in a power surge that caused a “hard shutdown” of the state’s data center, according to The Seattle Times. Joanne Todd, a spokeswoman for the Department of Information Services, said generators initially kicked on to maintain the system but that a second surge forced the generators to shut down. Todd said the generators are designed to shut down in that situation to avoid damage to equipment. (Read Full Article)

   Bookmark or Share this article

Login to comment.