Explosion Takes out our Webserver.

[ICT_GUY]

This is a new one on me, 10 out of 10 on the excuse meter.

Hi Chris

Saturday evening at 4:55 in the Houston data centre where the Rose server is located, an 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 servers were damaged or lost and the data is still safely on the server.

All members of the support team are in, and all vendors who supply the data center equipment are on site. The initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday CDT. Rest assured the support team are working around the clock.

There is no impact in any of our other servers. As we are unable to currently access the back-up systems we are unable to restore your account to another server but if you have a back-up copy of your site on your local machine we would be able to create an account for you on another server and for you to re-upload your data to this server.

We do hope that during the next few hours access to the server will be regained as the team reinstate power to the affected servers.

We are sorry that this accident has occurred and apologize for the impact.

Best Regards,

NetPivotal Team

[kmount]

10/10 for effort.

[DMcCoy]

Fire at The Planet takes down thousands of websites | The Register

[CyberNerd]

Slashdot | Explosion At ThePlanet Datacenter Drops 9,000 Servers

[Andrew_C]

If you want to see what an electrical fire can do, have a look here (Mpeg movie)

[SimpleSi]

As we are unable to currently access the back-up systems

I see from the article that they seem to have other sites - I'l bet they are getting alot of enquires as to why they can't restore the backups to another location

regards

Simon

[SeanVin]

If you want to see what an electrical fire can do, have a look here (Mpeg movie)

Strictly speaking there is no such thing as an electrical fire - electricity does not catch fire, however it can act as a source of ignition, which makes all the stuff around it catch fire!

[Edu-IT]

ThePlanet are providing regular updates and from what I have read they're doing their absolute best to get everything up and running again. On the forum they've posted a recording which explains what they know about how the fire was caused. In this recording it talks about a member of staff who would usually have been in the room where the fire was carrying out checks at the time when this explosion happened. I think he's incredibly lucky that he wasn't in the room, instead he was helping a customer. Yes this has caused major disruption but it could have been a lot worse.

[ICT_GUY]

Strictly speaking there is no such thing as an electrical fire - electricity does not catch fire, however it can act as a source of ignition, which makes all the stuff around it catch fire!

Only in the sense that no combustion takes place, otherwise an electric arc is fairly close to a flame as you can get, and usually a very very hot one at that. My old arc welder had a carbon arc brazing attachment that would burn through anything.

[ICT_GUY]

And our site (and b3ta) is down again.

[SYNACK]

Only in the sense that no combustion takes place, otherwise an electric arc is fairly close to a flame as you can get, and usually a very very hot one at that. My old arc welder had a carbon arc brazing attachment that would burn through anything.

I just have to jump on my science band wagon now , a flame is a grouping of superheated gasses. An ark is a small pocket of plasma, the next state up from a gas that is caused by the extremely high voltage breaking down (striping the electrons from) the gas atoms in the path of the ark.

Result, the ark is much hotter and much more confined than a flame. They are both very hot but are quite different in the other respects.

[ICT_GUY]

I just have to jump on my science band wagon now , a flame is a grouping of superheated gasses. An ark is a small pocket of plasma, the next state up from a gas that is caused by the extremely high voltage breaking down (striping the electrons from) the gas atoms in the path of the ark.

Result, the ark is much hotter and much more confined than a flame. They are both very hot but are quite different in the other respects.

Sulks.

[Andrew_C]

Alright pedants; I'll rephrase my point.

A fire in, or caused by, electrical equipment can result in a huge BANG!

Happy now?