So, you thought things
were bad the last time the data centre where you work went down? Perhaps things
were pretty bad compared to other problems your facility has undergone in the
past. Nevertheless, there have been some
pretty epic data centre failures that make others look fairly routine. Data
Center Knowledge recently published their top 10 list of epic failures; we
would like to share some of them with you:
1. The Yahoo! Squirrel
From our perspective, one
of the qualifications for an epic data centre failure is that it be rooted in a
seemingly harmless event that causes more damage than one would normally
expect. Such is the case with the 2010
failure of a Yahoo! Facility in Santa Clara, California.
Squirrel problems at data
centres are not all that rare. After all, the furry little rodents love to
chew. However, in this particular case a single squirrel took out half the
Santa Clara data centre by chewing through some very important wires. Knowing that it is so easy to disrupt Yahoo!
operations, one wonders what some of the other search engine companies are up
to.
2. No Smoking, Please!
We already know that
cigarette smoking can cause serious health risks including lung cancer,
emphysema and heart disease however apparently it can spark one of those
memorable data centre events that qualifies as being epic. A case in point is an Australian data centre
that was brought down by a smouldering cigarette and a bed of mulch.
Apparently, the Perth iX
data centre was down for about an hour when the facility's smoke detection
equipment caught a whiff of burning mulch outside the building. The system mistakenly thought there was a
fire within the building, responding just the way it was designed to.
3. A Raging Storm
Superstorm Sandy, the
2012 hurricane that ended up being the second most expensive storm in American
history, produced data centre failures up and down the US eastern
seaboard. Although few Americans are
surprised by hurricane damage in the southern states, no one was prepared for
how serious the storm was in the North East.
Need we say more?
4. It Only Takes a Second
Perhaps the most epic
failure to interrupt data communications happened in 2012 as a result of the
'Leap Second Bug'. When a leap second
was added to the atomic clock the world relies on for accurate timekeeping,
numerous data centres around the world did not know what to do with it. Social media went down, torrent sites were
affected and even a number of flights out of Australia were interrupted. It's amazing what one second can do.
Lessons Learned
What can we learn from
these four epic data centre failures? We
can learn that a failure can happen literally anywhere – and at any time. You do not have to be operating a big
commercial facility to be affected by the littlest of things. In the end, it pays to be super diligent at
all times.
Source: Data Center Knowledge – http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/06/23/some-data-center-downtime-causes-unpredictable-10-strangest-ones/