"In a perfect world, data center outages would never happen; however, we do not live in a perfect world and sometimes, no matter how much a data center plans for an emergency, it can still fail. Just ask the French government.
Last week an incident occurred at a data center operated by a French servers and services company named Bull. A fire extinguishing system was accidentally triggered by a subcontractor on site that resulted in damage to several major components of a storage bay holding data for the French government’s accounts payable system, Chorus.
Unfortunately for Chorus, the damage led to a four-day outage along with severe impact that lead to the loss of data. The agency spent all Wednesday night working to recover the data it lost, and by Thursday morning a decision was made to just restore all of the data made before the incident. This took Chorus the rest of the weekend and by midnight Sunday the agency was able to finally restore service.
Bull, however was pretty quiet on the accident and only offered up the following statement:
““We can confirm that last Wednesday there was an incident affecting one of the rooms in one of our data centers,” said Bull media relations manager Aurélie Negro via email. “By putting the necessary emergency plan into action, we were able to resume normal operating conditions within an hour. However, the degraded operating conditions during that hour may have had an impact on some of our customers.”
Is your data center prepared for an accidental outage? What do you think about the way Bull handled the situation? Weigh in with your comments below."
