DreamHost does a post-mortem on a power outage affecting their Irvine, CA data center.

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DreamHost does a post-mortem on a power outage affecting their Irvine, CA data center. The takeaway paragraph follows. Originally posted in RISKS Digest by Steve Golson sgolson@trilobyte.com

“The power systems at the Irvine DC are designed to be redundant. The UPS system is “in-line” and in the event the power grid feeds go down, the UPS provides power until the diesel-powered generators kick in. We believe, at this time, that Alchemy was performing unannounced maintenance on their UPS systems and the systems failed – resulting in a complete power outage. In addition to their UPS systems failing, their generators did not kick in.”
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2013/03/19/power-disruption-affecting-us-west-data-center-irvine-ca/

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Deliberately naming and shaming their provider?

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Yes, pointing fingers and naming names. I expect that there will be a followup report to this with more details, based on this paragraph:

“The power failure lasted just a few minutes, however it created a number of major issues with our network and systems in the Irvine DC that took many hours for our operations teams to recover from. Not the least of which was the loss of several critical pieces of networking hardware which did not survive the power event. Complete details of these issues will be shared once we have completed a detailed review over the next couple of days.”