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Multiple Sites Down In SF Power Outage

Posted by kdawson on Tue Jul 24, 2007 06:12 PM
from the or-was-it-a-drunk dept.
Power IT
corewtfux writes with word of a major outage apparently centered on 365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District. Valleywag initially claimed that a drunken person had gotten in and damaged 40 racks, but an update from Technorati's Dave Sifry says the problem is a widespread power outage. Sites affected include Technorati, Netflix (these display nice "We're Dead" pages), Typepad, LiveJournal, Sun.com, and Craigslist (these just time out).
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  • I work in the Financial District (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slug_bait (118345) * on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:18PM (#19976327)
    I can verify that it affected much of the Financial District here in SF. We had the power go out 3 times. Seems to be back now. Haven't heard any explanation yet.

  • Oblig.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:18PM (#19976329)
    im in ur datacentr
    trashin ur racks

  • Redundant? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DogDude (805747) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:19PM (#19976335) Homepage
    Don't these large sites have failover capable, redundant servers in multiple physical locations? Why should a failure in one rack, one room, or heck, even one state for the giant sites, effect them?

    • Re:Redundant? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2007, @07:17PM (#19977053)
      They do, but one of the dirty little secrets of most data centers is that they don't have enough generator capacity for all the cooling. They'll woo you with the generator, the 2,000 gallons of diesel, and N+1 array of UPSes, but when utility power dies, it gets hot very quickly. And some racks must go down.

    • Re:Redundant? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ryanisflyboy (202507) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @07:32PM (#19977247) Homepage Journal
      For some of these sites they are a lot more central than you might realize. If they failed to build their systems with a secondary site in mind it can be near impossible for the "CTO" types to pony up the dollars for it later. The biggest issue I have seen that affects this is storage. Either they aren't using suitable SAN technologies, or they didn't put enough money behind the storage initiative to set up secondary site replication. I agree with you though. This is a problem that has been solved. Perhaps netflix thought - wth - if we go out for a few hours and people can choose their movies that's just tough luck.

      Sun.com going down is a good example of someone totally screwing up. They have absolutely NO excuse. The others - maybe they can get away with it and we won't care. If Sun can't keep their own site up, how can I expect them to keep mine up?

  • From Technocrati: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Darth_brooks (180756) <chico AT wccnet DOT org> on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:36PM (#19976571) Homepage
    We are working with our co-location facility managers to assess why it is back-up power generators failed to provide the necessary back-up power to prevent our site going down. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by our site being unavailable this afternoon.

    I think that's admin speak for:

    I warned these idiots eight months ago during my review that the datacenter had outgrown its generator capacity. But did they listen? Fuck no, they just kept counting money and worrying about the bottom line. The beancounters looked at me like I'd asked them for a blowjob from their grandmothers when I submitted the workup for additional generator capacity. And now that the shit's hit the fan, whose ass are they screaming for? Screw this, I'm applying at Taco Bell.

  • Kiss of Death? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Honig the Apothecary (515163) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:53PM (#19976773)
    Press Release on Red Envelope having 2 years of uptime at 365 Main - San Francisco from today: http://365main.com/press_releases/pr_7_24_07_red_e nvelope.html [365main.com]

  • About Emergency Power (Score:5, Informative)

    by linuxwrangler (582055) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @07:13PM (#19977021)
    It's been a long time since I went on a tour of several data centers to locate a new facility for our dot-com. I believe that 365 Main was a facility that does not use a battery UPS. Instead, they have engine-backed flywheel UPS system (see http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/monthl y/art.php?2813 [enterprise...ervers.com] for a description). At the time, they have 10 2-megawatt generators on the roof in a N+2 configuration. The engines are kept heated and are spec'd to go from stop to engage-clutch/deliver-power in 3 seconds. The flywheel can deliver 11 seconds of power so they can fail through a couple of bad engines before running out of flywheel power. They periodidally do a 20-hour load test into a pair of 500,000 watt heat-sinks. Time will tell if this outage was a failure of design, failure of maintenance, or outright malfeasance. But it wasn't supposed to happen. They've got some 'splainin' to do.

    As to diesel storage, use of diesel is widespread for emergency use everywhere from hospitals to emergency-services to hospitals. Those systems are run regularly - typically weekly. The use of biocides, stabilizers, and mobile fuel-scrubbing services, and extra filtration systems can maintain the fuel quality. Our colo currently maintains a 1-week fuel-supply and has multiple quick-refuel contracts in place. I can't imagine any colo having less than 24-48 hours in-the-tank with quick-refill on-call.

    But one thing that is missing is cooling. Our colo has a typical contract that says something like blah-blah won't exceed 80F for more than 4 hours blah blah. OK, but a rack full of blade servers can crank out 15-20kW of heat load and a data center can heat up real quick without AC. By contract, 150F for 3.5 hours would be in-spec.

    • Re:No Generators? (Score:5, Informative)

      by grumling (94709) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:31PM (#19976493) Homepage
      Well, you test and test and test, and when something finally happens, nothing. Stuff happens.

      Brownouts sometimes fail to trigger generators, even though they should. If only one phase goes down, depending on the design, it may not trip (and would cause a somewhat random outage, like some drunk shutting down racks).

      If the generator runs on diesel, they usually only plan for a few hours of backup. If they didn't recalculate the generator runtime as they added equipment, the load may have caused the fuel consumption to go up higher than anticipated. Is it hot in SF today? Air handlers may be straining to keep the place cool, or maybe the generator got running too hot.

      Often times, as equipment is added, the load gets out of balance between phases. It is usually a good idea to keep the load as even as possible, but in a high traffic data center, I would imagine there would be a lot of stuff moving in and out, expanding and contracting, and it may become hard to keep track of the loads across phases. A good facilities manager should be able to tell you the current load off the top of his head, but too often these details get left out.

      This is just stuff I've seen in cable TV headends over the years. Granted, this facility should have a power manager/engineer on staff, but so often the power is one of the first things to get cut from the budget.

      • Re:No Generators? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MichaelSmith (789609) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @07:14PM (#19977037) Homepage Journal

        Stuff happens

        No kidding. years ago in my former job on traffic systems we had a great UPS with a generator on site and the ability keep it fueled up indefinitely. A security contractor came in on the weekend to install something and tried to wire up a new circuit hot. He slipped with a screwdriver and shorted the white phase to the chasis of the breaker panel. I don't think the tip of the driver actually touched ground, but the burn mark is still there to show how close he got.

        The resuting current spike blew the 100A fuses (heavy metal strips) both going in to and out of the UPS. With the UPS effectively broken the generator set failed to start and the system gracefully shut down 40 minutes after the incident. Thats not bad. The batteries were only specified to work long enough for the genny to settle at 50Hz.

        In the process of blowing the fuses a spike got back into the power supply of one of our DEC Alphas and took out the power supply. The system was redundant at the software level so I didn't notice immediately.

        The UPS guy came out and didn't have enough fuses to replace the blown one, but we found that with a bit of brute force and filing attacks some others could be made to fit.

        Please type the word in this image: problems

    • zombies .... (Score:5, Funny)

      by taniwha (70410) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:31PM (#19976507) Homepage Journal
      There's a report here [sfgate.com] that "Flesh-eating zombies are prowling the streets"

      • Re:No Generators? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by eln (21727) * on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:31PM (#19976503) Homepage
        Any data center that advertises high availability should be testing that sort of thing on a regular basis. It's possible that they could fail switchover even if they are being regularly tested, but it is unlikely.

        If the "power outage" theory is correct and the "drunken employee" theory is incorrect, as a customer I'd be pissed that the data center I pay tons of money to can't keep my site up in the event of a power outage, which is one of the main perks of hosting at a data center in the first place.

      • Re:No Generators? (Score:5, Informative)

        by eln (21727) * on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:39PM (#19976603) Homepage
        This is a DATA CENTER, its whole purpose in life is to be available when things like this happen. It had better have generators and plenty of fuel on hand at all times. The data center I work at has the capability to run at full power with nothing coming in from the outside world for 36 hours. I don't know what the standard is for other data centers, but it seems like they should be capable of getting at least 12 hours of operation without incoming power from the grid.

      • Insane level of backup... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by SmoothTom (455688) <Tomas@TiJiL.org> on Tuesday July 24 2007, @08:03PM (#19977561) Homepage
        ...until the commercial power fails and doesn't come back for days.

        The only places I've actually seen the insane levels of backup that some would like is in some telco central offices. The one I was associated with the longest had eight-hour-plus battery backup and 8 days of fuel for the diesels. Some of our really remote microwave sites had 24 hour battery and 30 day diesel.

        Of course one of those sites failed high up in a mountain range in a mid-winter storm (Tieton, 1978) when the commercial power failed, and the starter battery for the diesel froze. When one of the techs finally got there (after burying his Sno-Cat and walking the last couple miles), he had to chip ice off the steel door to get inside, where he was able to get the diesel started with a little "rewire" of one of the backup battery sets. Oh, his two-way radio also failed during his hike, since it was outside his snowsuit, and the lack of communication caused the company to start two more Sno-Cats and a helicopter in that direction.

        The site was out for nearly six hours, IIRC.

        Even the BEST designs are subject to failure. :o(

        --
        Tomas

    • Re:LiveJournal?? (Score:5, Funny)

      by eln (21727) * on Tuesday July 24 2007, @06:36PM (#19976573) Homepage
      Impossible, they would never commit suicide without posting a note in the form of bad angst-filled poetry to their blog first. There is no chance any of them will actually kill themselves until the site is back online.

          • Re:Redundent power supply? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by aaarrrgggh (9205) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @07:00PM (#19976871)
            It takes Diesel a few years to go bad. That site has fuel polishing systems to prevent that. Because of earthquake risk, they contractually are obliged to have 24-48 hours of backup fuel with many of their clients.

            They have the HiTec rotary UPSs in all their facilities, which link a generator to a flywheel UPS. It's stupid to not have backup fuel for that type of system; you can only run for 13 seconds before the load crashes.

            It is possible that they got a number of small hits and the generators failed to re-start after a few. Good procedures are to stay on generator until utility stabilizes if you have more than one "hit."

            Be interesting to find out what happened.

    • Re:The Scoop from SFGate.com (Score:5, Funny)

      by RealGrouchy (943109) on Tuesday July 24 2007, @07:25PM (#19977169)
      It was hard to read through that block of text, but looking closely, it explains why:

      "Officials say the power outage may affect some websites, including the site that hosts Slashdot.org's preview button."

      It all seems to be back up now.

      - RG>

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