Down for several hours due to power problems at the server farm. Apparently a circuit breaker melted and power couldn’t be shifted to the back-up generation system.
Too many people are moving to Phoenix and overloading the local grid, IMHO.
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4 comments
Next movie: “Harry Potter and the Disorder of Phoenix”?
Clarify something for me: is NFS in fact building its own new datacenter, or was that remark just jdw’s letting off steam (which he certainly had every right to do under the circumstances)?
My understanding is that they have dedicated servers at the Phoenix site, and whatever happened was the result of a scheduled, but unannounced, maintenance procedure by the site operators. I don’t know what they did, put I have never heard of a master breaker meltdown that didn’t involve a lightning strike. I’ve had defective breakers in the 15 amp range do it because they couldn’t trip due to corrosion, but never one of the big ones.
Given the problems there have been, I can see why they might be looking at the cost of their own datacenter, but I don’t think they have made any final decision.
You would have to be near a major hub, like Dallas, to make it economically feasible, and I don’t know that they want to move themselves and their operation.
The Woodlands is a beautiful place to live and work. I was there recently because Stella’s deceased sister lived in some apartments there. Back in college, I helped with the species survey done in, um, the woodlands before they built The Woodlands as a human community, and they really tried hard to do everything right from an environmental standpoint. (Don’t get me started about the one major thing they forgot… the proximity of Houston, and the inevitable commuting population of professionals who moved to The Woodlands.)
The Woodlands is wonderful… but an internet hub it is not. As much as I might appreciate greater reliability (it’s not been nearly as bad as my previous host in any case), I can understand that neither jdw nor his employees would want to relocate away from The Woodlands.
That would probably be one of the big factors in leasing from server farms. If you’re not a city person, big chunks of bandwidth aren’t available. We have too much bandwidth in a few places [the major node cities], and not enough everywhere else.