FOCUS NEWS EU
Issue 17, August/September
LIGHTNING STRIKES AMAZON IN DUBLIN
Amazon made headlines in the European Union in August after claiming lightning brought down a utility providing power to its data center, in turn causing an outage at a portion of its Dublin facility. Clients suffered losses to service as Amazon’s virtual infrastructure failed.
But in a detailed account of the outage, Amazon later
said utility ESB lost its
transformer but that it no longer believed lightning had an effect. It also said the Amazon data center’s backup had failed to kick in.
The actual power outage lasted for an hour, though ESB said customers experienced
partial losses for several hours following. Microsoft Dublin also suffered because of the outage but was back up and running with its outsoc services within hours.
Amazon took several days to get systems back to normal and said its second data center in south Dublin also suffered “power dips”. The Amazon Web Services team said it believed the facility’s programmable logic controllers (PLC) were at fault for its failed backup supply.
Amazon said it believes the PLC, which synchronizes the electrical phase between generators before feeding power into the facility, detected a ground fault, which
meant in this case it could not complete its task. As a result of the PLC’s failure, backup generators for most of the data center were disabled and there was not enough power to continue running all the servers.
Amazon issued a detailed incident report:
aws.amazon.com/message/2329B7
UK Telecity’s London Meridian Gate data center suffered two power outages recently. In the worst event, which lasted 20 minutes, it lost all power. On 27 July, tenant C4L said on its website that one of its core colocation sites suffered a complete mains outage. “The UPS and generator failed to kick in, taking all customers offl ine and breaking the 10G ring,” C4L told customers.
C4L said Telecity representatives said the outage was caused by an issue in the power distribution system. “Following the power incident at Meridian Gate earlier today we have identifi ed a fault on a breaker in the power distribution system,” it said. Earlier, the seventh fl oor of the company’s Harbour Exchange data center lost mains power, bringing down customer equipment located on that fl oor.
A server cooling system failure brought down the wholesale banking division of British fi nancial services company Lloyds Banking Group for several
hours according on 4 August, to ComputerWeekly.
The bank said: “We experienced an interruption in the early hours to our trading technology system,
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which provides services to our corporate customers.” The system was back up and running within a few hours. “We were still open for business and undertaking trades for our customers,
as well as
managing our core functions, so the impact was minimal.”
The Titanic Quarter – a fi nancial- services-oriented business park in Northern Ireland named after the ship that was built there – will soon become home to an £80m data center built by Data City Exchange.
The 150-acre park site in Belfast, which has dark fi ber links to the US and Europe, will be home to one of a network of data centers being built by the company in the UK, Ireland and the Caribbean. Phase 1 of the Titanic Exchange will be built for 1,000 IT racks. Phase 2 will add 1,600 racks.
Planning offi cials approved a 345,000 sq ft data center park in Huddersfi eld, near Manchester, that will consist of 12 buildings. Developer Stirling Scotfi eld bought the 18.7 hectare property in 2008 and has been fi ghting for local planning permission after a group of local residents raised objections to the development.
www.datacenterdynamics.com
Telehouse opened almost 1,000 sq m of additional colocation space, offering 10kW per rack at its Telehouse West data center in London’s East India Dock. It said since opening Telehouse West in 2010 it has experienced high demand, especially from multinational companies looking for high-capacity data center space in London.
Equinix completed the second stage of its London LD5 IBX data center, adding 4,000 sq m of customer space in Slough. LD5 now caters for an additional 1,400 cabinet equivalents. Four phases in total are planned for the data center – once complete LD5 will cover 27,800 sq m of space and hold 5,600 cabinet equivalents.
FRANCE Interxion said it will build its seventh data center in Paris, adding 9,000 sq m of equipped space
to its French portfolio.
Phase 1 of the €130m project will cover 4,500 sq m and will be complete in Q2 2012. The data center will provide 2kVa of power per sq m once complete.
SWEDEN The Swedish Competition Authority made ‘unannounced’ visits to Verizon data centers,
occupied by NASDAQ OMX to investigate potential anti- competitive behaviour after claims that a company was denied data center facilities there. NASDAQ OMX said the allegations stemmed from a complaint made by MTF Burgundy in autumn 2010 that it was denied space to house its servers at Verizon’s data center in Sweden.
RUSSIA Russia’s largest credit institution, Sberbank, said it will invest up to US$800m in part for a data center, in a new technology park being pushed by The Kremlin as Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley. Sberbank head Berman Gref claimed the 7,000 sq m data center, which will also offer general colocation, will be one of the most powerful in Europe once it is built.
SWITZERLAND
Power and automation vendor ABB is installing a high-voltage direct current power distribution system made by its recently acquired subsidiary, Validus DC, at a Swiss data center. The 1MW power distribution system will be used as a showcase. The client is a Swiss provider of hosting and other IT and communications services.
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