June 2, 2008
Fire at The Planet
One of my dedicated servers, which holds many of my income generating sites, is hosted at The Planet. Well, I originally hosted it with Rackshack, who was bought out by EV1, who was then bought out by The Planet. Their tech support isn’t great, but for me to move the server would have been very painful due to the configuration I have done on this server.
Then I heard of the fire over the weekend. There was a short, which the rumor it was caused by the Raspberry Ant infestation in Houston. Seriously, these ants love electricity and have been causing shorts all over the Houston area. The short caused an explosion in the cooling room which burned down three walls and around 9,000 servers.
Mine, was not among the 9,000. My question is, shouldn’t there have been a Halon system? When I worked for WordPerfect about twenty years ago in their disk production clean room, if there was a fire, Halon would release from the ceiling extinguishing all fire in the room immediately.
I don’t get how a fire could destroy one server, let alone 9,000 in a data environment. I’ll be moving the server ASAP. If you host at The Planet, I would suggest you do as well.
Filed under Webmaster by Jerry West
Comments on Fire at The Planet »
The fire didn’t destroy any servers just knocked out power to 9000 servers.
The big problem we have had is that the search engines redirected traffic away from that data center entirely while they fix the problem.
So even the servers that didn’t go down got hurt by zero traffic.
“Power Lost” or “Servers Destroyed” has the same effect for a business owner - no business.
Halon was banned under the Montreal Protocol Agreement as it’s as bad for the ozone layer as a cow’s fart. They now use expensive stuff like FM200, which does nearly as good a job, Inergen and others and I imagine they have this where needed otherwise they wouldn’t get insurance