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A fire at a Texas data centre known as The Planet has affected 9,000 servers, bringing down web pages across the globe. The blaze, which started after an electrical short, took out three walls surrounding the centre’s electrical equipment room. So far the team has established that the servers themselves are undamaged and it looks likely that no data has been lost. “We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage,” said The Planet team in a company blog.

“Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our back-up generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.” The team is now working round the clock to fix the problem and is using parts from the company’s five other data centres to re-establish the affected sites, which include popular British online forum B3ta.com. The team had hoped to get the sites online yesterday but continuing fire service action and network issues have extended the problem.

Thanks to Chris Vallee.




  1. Eideard says:

    Sites as far away as Oz are down behind this one. Waiting to hear back from Simon Mansfield – hoping to get his flock of newsletters back online by tonight [U.S. time zones]: SpaceDaily, TerraDaily, etc..

  2. MetalHead says:

    Glad to see that the data is safe. That’s gonna be one hell of a project to bring it back to full functionality.

  3. ethanol says:

    This is why redundancy needs to happen geographically, not just at hardware and software levels. 25 mile minimum radius in case of nuke…

  4. Mister Mustard says:

    Don’t these places have fire suppression systems? Jeez, computer rooms had that when I was in college back in the seventies. Wtf?

  5. lou says:

    Never felt the pain.
    Like a tree falling in the woods.

  6. jim h says:

    StatCounter.com, a major hit counting service which I use for my (insignificant) sites, was down for a while because they use ThePlanet.

    When I couldn’t get the StatCounter web site, I started checking and found out that StatCounter is in Ireland, and was brought down by a fire in Texas.

    It’s now officially one world.

  7. Eideard says:

    Simon’s back up in Australia. Space Daily Express hit my inbox about an hour ago.

    That’s got to be about as far away from Houston as you can get and still have Earth under your feet.

  8. SJP says:

    How much memory does 9,000 servers have?

  9. ECA says:

    9,
    I think you are asking how many Sites can a server hold and control…
    Servers need ram, but they need HD space more, but that is only limited but how many site 1 machine can control and KEEP up speed.

    Could run them like a 386 with a 2400 baud modem, or a P3 with a 1000Mbit net card..

    Space on an HD depends on HOW big the company wants to be, and display of data.. MOST wont be AMAZON/EBay/NewEgg..

  10. Daniel says:

    #5

    Datacenters usually have halon or other sort of fire suppression systems but the adjacent electrical distribution systems that power said datacenters don’t.

  11. Mac Guy says:

    #5 – #11 is correct. Not to mention the fact that if the fire department says “shut it all off now,” you have no choice.

  12. JimD says:

    One of the reasons you should NOT STORE YOUR DATA ON-LINE !!! They lucked out this time, but the entire Data Center might have been destroyed along with ALL YOUR DATA, if you were foolish enough to store it there without a backup ….

  13. gmknobl says:

    Has anyone else noted that this is the second data store fire within about half a year? I don’t know what company had the first but there was one that affected several websites long about November or December I think.

    If there’s a third something fishy might be going on OR people are overstressing these systems as a rule. And that’s bad for all of us.

  14. ECA says:

    13,
    CORRECT..
    I warn all users..
    IF you want to keep it, GET IT OFF THE COMPUTER
    Do not expect it NOT to fail, and dont pass the BUCK, and expect OTHER systems NOT TO FAIL/change/update/erase your data.

  15. ECA says:

    14,
    SOP, is to install as much as you can.
    If you need more, you install more.
    forgetting infrastructure…
    Such as..HOW many things can you PLUG in to a Outlet before you BLOW a fuse.
    And that a SLOW BLOW, a Overafe thats just a few % over what you SHOULD be running, can HEAT up wires, and NOT BLOW the fuse.
    For locations as this, it should be DESIGNED for the use, or built from the GROUND UP for this use.
    I wouldnt trust ANY building over 30 years old to be able to handle the LOAD of all these systems.. Without a FULL rebuild.

  16. jbellies says:

    Excuse the naive question … Looking at the photo provided … when you have a kazillion-server farm, instead of having a kazillion AC to DC power supplies, why not wire the place in DC and simply not have to deal with all that heat?

  17. CodyLoco says:

    Is that actually a picture of their datacenter? Or just a stock picture?


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