Update: Datacentres untouched by Melbourne freak storm
- 08 March, 2010 11:47
- Comments 1
Datacentres in Melbourne appear to have escaped effects of the deluge that hit the city over the weekend.
Thunderstorms descended onto Melbourne on Saturday and Sunday bringing torrential rain and hail measuring the size of tennis balls. Roads were turn into rivers, leaving a trail of destruction which caused water and structural damage to Eithad Stadium.
The after-affects from the storm is said to cost the city millions of dollars in repairs.
There was speculations Datacom's Melbourne datacentre – trading under the GlobalCentre – was flooded and out of service for at least an hour but Datacom CEO, Michael Browne denied these claims.
“We weren’t flooded. It was a minor event,” he said. “Anyone saying it’s flooded is erroneous.”
He said the rainfall and hail did affect the facility but the company enforced its contingency plan and contractors were called in to pre-empt any failure events.
“One switchboard – out of a dozen – went down but it only concerned a very small group of clients,” Browne said. “They were using single feed systems and most contemporary systems have dual feed. Those using dual feed in our datacentre weren’t impacted by it.”
Hail blocked drainage pipes outside the facility causing water to overflow but Browne stressed that no water entered into the datacentre.
(A purported customer of Datacom is attempting to mount a lawsuit against the service provider claiming the datacentre was indeed flooded which caused a service to be out for over 12 hours. Click here to view the story.)
iPrimus, which owns a large datacentre on King Street, said the terrible weather had no impact on operations.
“It wasn’t just pure luck we came out fine, it was the effort put into ruggardising the datacentre last year,” Primus Telecom CEO, Ravi Bhatia, said. “We underwent a multimillion dollar refit of the datacentre and it withstood all that was thrown at us.”
An AAPT spokesperson told ARN its datacentre also dodged any damages.
“Our network wasn’t affected and we didn’t experience any notable impact to our services due to the ghastly weather,” she said. “We have our own staff and processes in our co-location facilities so whenever there is an incident like that it all kicks into gear straight away and mitigates any issues.”
More rain is forecasted for Melbourne today.
Update: ARN contacted Browne again and he maintained the facility was not flooded but admitted "there might have been some leakage intrusion".
Has your business been affected by the storm? Contact spandas_lui@idg.com.au
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Comments
PJJG
The senior management at Datacom should come clean. Their datacentre may not have been "flooded" according to their understanding, but critical customer equipment did experience "water damage" resulting in operational down time outside of the agreed SLAs. When a crisis situation occurs, admit it and communicate the recovery plan, but don't hide it, or lie, because you will lose our trust and our business as your clients. Your choice; but don't treat us, your loyal clients as idiots!
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