Category: Data Center Outages

Will an idea to build a data center park powered by onsite clean energy and paired with a microgrid in Colorado, represent the future of data centers? Created by developer Craig Harrison, the Niobrara Data Center Energy Park is a proposal for a company or even the government to build one or more data centers on a one-square mile plot of land in Colorado’s Weld County.

Harrison says the site is unique in that a natural gas power plant could be built on it (a gas hub is a few miles away), and has a sunny climate that would enable an onsite solar panel farm. These local clean energy sources could be connected in a microgrid that could add uptime security for a data center, as well as reduce efficiency losses from transmission.

A power outage Friday morning in an Equinix data center in California caused problems for a number of customers, most notably Zoho, which experienced hours of downtime for several of its web-based office applications. Equinix acknowledged the incident, but did not provide details on the cause of the outage at its SV4 facility in Silicon Valley. “This morning, an Equinix data center experienced a power failure that affected a number of customers, including Zoho,” Equinix said in a statement. “We immediately notified the affected customers and full service was restored within a matter of seconds. We are investigating the root cause of the issue. We deeply regret the impact and inconvenience this incident caused our customers.”

Rackspace Hosting has leased a large chunk of data center space in Richardson, Texas to expand its growing cloud computing operation. On Dec. 29 the company leased 58,200 square feet of data center space at Digital Realty Trust’s huge Datacenter Park – Dallas campus. Rackspace (RAX) has emerged as one of the leading players in the fast-growing market for cloud computing services. The company added more than 12,000 servers last year to acommodate new cloud customers, leading to a major expansion of Rackspace’s data center infrastructure. Expansion Option in Dallas The new facility will provide Rackspace (RAX) with an expansion option in the Dallas market, where it operates one of its largest data centers. The company’s current facility in Grapevine, Texas is also one of its oldest data centers, and was the site of of power outage in 2009 that involved a series of equipment failures.

Here’s our review of today’s noteworthy links for the data center industry: nlyte and Skanska Partner. nlyte Software and Skanska’s Mission Critical Center of Excellence announced a partnership that integrates nlyte’s innovative data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software into Skanska’s data center intelligence platform. With the nlyte DCIM solution within the Skanska solution the end user can reduce migration time and cost for new Skanska-built facilities by up to 50 percent, lower business risk and expense caused by downtime and catastrophic failure, and improve operational excellence and reduce total cost of ownership. “Skanska is a leader in the field of datacenter construction and nlyte Software in DCIM. It makes good commercial sense for them to work together,” said Andy Lawrence, research director at The 451 Group. “The integration of nlyte’s software with Skanska’s technology means that Skanska’s customers will have the precise ...

On October 29, a freak early-season snowstorm hit eastern New York and western and parts of central New England, blanketing some areas in as much as two feet of highly unusual pre-Halloween snow.

Technologies that accentuate the conservation, cleaning up, and generation of reliable electricity would sustain the future of modern digital economies. Demand for power across the globe is growing at a robust pace annually, riding on thriving economies. The insatiable demand for clean and reliable power supply is growing with each passing day and positions itself as a market to tap for the UPS industry. More than half of the electricity demand is accounted by the information technology market, making it a force to reckon with. In the US alone, about 8% of the electricity is consumed by the use of Internet, ranking it higher than the steel and chemical industries. The global consumption of electrical power is projected to leap to 20 trillion kilowatt-hours by 2015. Power problems such as outages, brownouts, and blackouts therefore result in colossal loss to an economy. Power management technologies are portended to rule high ...

A dagram of the utility archotecture supporting the Facebook data center in lulea, Sweden, which will operate with fewer generators than Facebook's U.S. data centers. For most data centers, backup generators serve as the last line of defense against downtime during utility power outages. Some major data centers use more than 30 diesel generators to ensure a ready supply of on-site generation. Facebook is taking a different approach at its new data center in Sweden, reducing the number of backup generators by 70 percent. Facebook says the extraordinary reliability of the regional power grid serving the town of Lulea allows the company to use far fewer generators than in its U.S. facilities. Using fewer generators reduces the data center’s impact on the local environment in several ways. It allows Facebook to store less diesel fuel on site, and reduces emissions from generator testing, which is usually ...

Building a data center that minimizes use of fossil fuels is one of the gargantuan tasks facing the IT industry, yet at least one company has a simple solution: move to Iceland. With cooling freely provided by nature and access to both geothermal and hydroelectric energy, the UK-based co-location vendor Verne Global says it is on the verge of opening a “100% carbon neutral” data center before ...

October 5, 2011 -- AIS announced on Monday that golf equipment manufacturer Callaway Golf Company recently completed its move into the AIS enterprise-class, Lightwave Data Center. Located 30 miles south of its corporate headquarters, AIS provides Callaway with reliability, redundancy, security and room for growth along with fixed costs for easier budgeting.

A new supercomputing facility in West Virginia could help improve weather forecasters’ ability to predict the power of huge hurricanes, which could eventually help public officials make better decisions about when to call for the kind of mass evacuations seen during Hurricane Irene. Next month The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will bring a new data center online. The facility in Fairmont, West Virginia will support a 383-teraflop supercomputer designed to develop more powerful tools for analyzing the behavior of hurricanes. NOAA staffers discussed the project in a presentation last week at the AFCOM Data Center World fall conference in Orlando. Computer Models Improving Hurricane scientists have developed sophisticated computer models to analyze the threat posed by hurricanes. This has helped forecasters make significant strides in projecting the path a hurricane will take. But it remains more difficult to predict the intensity of hurricanes, which can fluctuate in strength ...

PowerSecure International, Inc. (Nasdaq: POWR) today reported its proprietary IDG® PowerBlock generator technology operated flawlessly to support a West Coast data center during the recent blackout. PowerSecure’s PowerBlock system carried the full load of the facility for the eleven hour duration of the blackout, protecting the data center’s operations until utility power was restored. The widespread nature and timing of the outage also impacted the ability of the data center to ensure its fuel supply was adequate – and PowerSecure’s employees quickly initiated actions on behalf of the customer to ensure fuel was readily available for any possible outage duration.

San Diego’s leading data center service provider said its facilities remained online during a massive power outage Thursday that affected much of Southern California. The massive outage has been largely resolved as of Friday morning, local officials said. “All of our data centers are up, and on generator power,” said Tim Caulfield, CEO of American Internet Services (AIS), which operates three data centers in San Diego. “There have been no issues, and no impact on customer services.” Reached Thursday night, Caulfield said the company was preparing for an outage lasting 24 to 48 hours. “Our biggest concern now is a multi-day event where we would need to refuel,” said Caulfield. “Obviously, (fuel deliveries) are being diverted to critical infrastructure like hospitals. We’re confident in our fuel deliveries, but you’re never totally comfortable until the truck is outside the building. We’re preparing for a long event.”

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.

Wenatchee World has an article on the diesel generators permitted by the Washington Dept of Ecology. Ecology issues more generator permits By K.C. MehaffeyWorld staff writer Wednesday, August 31, 2011 QUINCY — The state Department of Ecology on Friday issued an air quality permit to Sabey Corp., allowing the company to install 44 backup generators for a 520,000-square-foot Intergate-Quincy Data Center in case of a power outage. On Aug. 5, Ecology approved 28 backup generators for the Dell Data Center in Quincy. Last year, Microsoft won approval to expand its diesel generators to 37, and early this year, Yahoo! was granted permission to increase its generators to 23. This brings the total diesel generators permitted to 132. That brings the total number of approved backup generators in Quincy to 132. The state agency evaluated the potential health risks from that much diesel exhaust, which has several toxic pollutants.

Key East Coast data centers say they weathered Hurricane Irene without any loss of services to customers customer service. In some cases, facilities were operating on generator power after utility outages, and some data centers had to plug leaks.