Explosion Rocks The Planet

“This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were dam

Houston TX data center The Planet experienced a suspicious outage on Saturday afternoon that evolved in a full blown crisis. According to reports on The Planet’s forum, at approximately 5:45 pm on Saturday, May 31,2008, a transformer in their H1 data center caught fire, resulting in the shutdown of all generators to their North Houston data center.

Houston TX data center The Planet experienced a suspicious outage on Saturday afternoon that evolved in a full blown crisis.  According to reports on The Planet’s forum, at approximately 5:45 pm on Saturday, May 31,2008, a transformer in their H1 data center caught fire, resulting in the shutdown of all generators to their North Houston data center.  Fire and emergency units we immediately deployed and damages were assessed.  It was determined to be an electrical fire and no flames were reported.

Even though no server hardware was damaged, Doug Erwin, CEO of The Planet released the following statement 5 hours later with complete details.

“This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.
We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.
This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.
We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.
There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.
I am sorry that this accident has occurred and I apologize for the impact.”

Kevin Hazard has assured all customers the will “live up to our SLA agreements, and will proactively credit accounts” once they understand full outage times.  Even though many efforts were made to bring services back online within 24 hours, the complete management and technical staff at The Planet has been working around the clock to issue repairs and bring full power back to the facility.

Initial damage assessments were adjusted as reports from technical staff and contractors were brought in on Sunday and by 11:00 pm, Hazard reported on The Planet’s forum that;

“As you have read, we have begun receiving some of the equipment required to start repairs. While no customer servers have been damaged or lost, we have new information that damage to our H1 data center is worse than initially expected. Three walls of the electrical equipment room on the first floor blew several feet from their original position, and the underground cabling that powers the first floor of H1 was destroyed.

There is some good news, however. We have found a way to get power to Phase 2 (upstairs, second floor) of the data center and to restore network connectivity. We will be powering up the air conditioning system and other necessary equipment within the next few hours. Once these systems are tested, we will begin bringing the 6,000 servers online. It will take four to five hours to get them all running.

We have brought in additional support from Dallas to have more hands and eyes on site to help with any servers that may experience problems. The call center has also brought in double staff to handle the increase in tickets we're expecting. Hopefully by sunrise tomorrow Phase 2 will be well on its way to full production.

Let me next address Phase 1 (first floor) of the data center and the affected 3,000 servers. The news is not as good, and we were not as lucky. The damage there was far more extensive, and we have a bigger challenge that will require a two-step process. For the first step, we have designed a temporary method that we believe will bring power back to those servers sometime tomorrow evening, but the solution will be temporary. We will use a generator to supply power through next weekend when the necessary gear will be delivered to permanently restore normal utility power and our battery backup system. During the upcoming week, we will be working with those customers to resolve issues.

We know this may not be a satisfactory solution for you and your business but at this time, it is the best we can do.

We understand that you will be due service credits based on our Service Level Agreement. We will proactively begin providing those following the restoration of service, which is our number priority, so please bear with us until this has been completed.

I recognize that this is not all good news. I can only assure you we will continue to utilize every means possible to fully restore service.”

Shortly after midnight, the Houston Fire Marshal permitted the technical staff to bring power back to the facility and the long process of cooling the data center floor and restoring power to the hardware on a per rack basis.

As of 9:00 am this morning, the staff at The Planet is continuing to work on schedule to bring all hardware online and it is reported that 90% of all servers are up and running.