Data center outage causes major flight delays

A system error took down the National Airspace Data Interchange Network (NADIN), a multi-billion dollar data center operated by the FAA, for several hours yesterday. The system outage made thousands of airline flight plans unavailable, meaning thousands of planes could not take off in the United States until the issue was fixed.

The problem has been linked to a router that went down after routine scheduled maintenance. The data center did have a back-up in place, but it failed to start after the main router failed.

This is NADIN’s fourth outage since its introduction in 2002. The system has been heavily criticized for its high cost and poor reliability.

Source | Computer World

Maintenance error shuts down .se domain

An error made during routine maintenance on the .se domain last night shut down all 905,000 names on the ccTLD for a period of around 20 minutes.

Though the exact cause of the outage has yet to be determined, many believe it to be the result of a typo in the registry zone files.

As far as failures go, this one is fairly serious. While the downtime was only 20 minutes, all .se domains were affected. Sweden is lucky the problem was caught and fixed so quickly. When new gTLDs come online next year, expect to hear more stories like this.

Source | Domain Name News
Photo | venteco

Prevent data disasters with a RAID array

Do you make regular backups of your data? Even if you do, you will always experience significant downtime in the event of a hard disk failure on your dedicated server.

One solution to this problem is to upgrade from a single drive to a RAID array. Simply put, the technology involves running two hard drives in tandem. One is used by the server, while the other keeps a constant backup of everything. In the event the main drive fails, the backup takes over.

After experiencing two hard drive failures on my dedicated server, I paid my provider around £100 to have a second hard drive installed for RAID. While a bit pricey up front, the cost of downtime for me was much greater. I not only lost revenue when my sites were down, but also had to spend a significant chunk of time reconfiguring my server and uploading my data. A RAID array was a no-brainer.

Track website outages with uptime monitors

In the busy world we live in, it’s impossible for most people to monitor their sites 24/7. But tracking your site’s speed and uptime throughout the day is critical. Thankfully, you can use an uptime monitor to track the availability of any URL.

Most uptime trackers charge a small fee per month, but can record when a site goes down, for how long, and also send out a text message or email to alert you of any problems. Some even track website speed.

An uptime monitor can be a good investment in a number of situations. Most notably, the sooner you know your website has a problem, the sooner you can contact your host and get it fixed. Downtime costs money, and the longer your site is down, the more money you lose. Owners of high-revenue or mission-critical sites will find an uptime monitor indispensable.

Photo | Flickr

Amazing data center remodel

Unlike the extreme server room makeover posted on Monday, the remodeling in this video is real. The time-lapse playback shows a huge renovation to Concordia University’s data center in Portland, Oregon.

More than 200 meters of fiber optic line and 1 mile of copper cabling were laid. While the remodel took three months to complete, services were only out for ten hours.

One of the biggest challenges for web hosting providers is finding a way to conduct maintenance while still keeping servers online. While downtime can never be completely avoided, any time the servers aren’t running is money lost and customers have very high performance expectations.

Fire takes Seattle data center offline

Seattle residents experienced more than a little summer heat today when a small fire took a downtown data center offline.

A number of services were affected by the outage, including the Port of Seattle’s mail servers, a local hospital’s IT system, as well as thousands of websites. Some local residents also lost Internet.

The fire was reportedly caused by an electrical failure on a piece of equipment. System technicians are working to restore service, but so far little progress seems to have been made.

Let this be a reminder to everyone not to take uptime for granted. One data center user reported that this was the first downtime he has experienced in years. But when a system goes down, it goes down hard. Always make back-ups and always have an emergency plan in place.

Sources | Beta News & SeattlePI

Photo: Flickr

Should Web Hosts Pay for Downtime?

Yesterday, American datacenter customers received a landmark £1 million settlement from their provider after experiencing up to several weeks of downtime. This leads to the question: should hosts be held accountable for downtime?

A good host will have an uptime of at least 99.5%. This translate to roughly 1.8 days of downtime per year. This is time that your website is unavailable to the world.

All hosts have outages. It’s just one of those things we have to deal with. If your web host is any good, most downtime will be the result of maintenance. It’s not uncommon, however, to hear about a host experiencing up to several consecutive days of downtime or instances of poor performance lasting weeks.
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Datacenter Customers Get £1 Million Settlement

A federal judge in Maryland today approved a £1.07 million ($1.67 million USD) settlement today for nearly 5,500 customers of NaviSite, a datacenter that suffered long downtime after several servers were accidentally unplugged.

NaviSite had told its customers to expect downtime for a server upgrade. Instead of upgrading the servers, however, they were unplugged when the company attempted to move them to a new location.

Nearly 200,000 websites suffered slow performance or were completely unavailable for as little as a few days to several weeks. The customers received four times their monthly bill in the settlement. The largest amount won by any one customer was £6,446 ($10,000 USD).

For ecommerce sites that lost customers, however, the equivalent of a few month’s free hosting won’t make up for the lost business. Some companies report losing as many as half their clients because of the outage.

The lead lawyer in the case, Stuart A. Davidson, made this comment:

Things just went completely awry. It may not be that big of a deal for maybe a book club … but for companies that actually sell, like e-commerce companies, being down for one hour, much less a day or weeks or more….

Source: Maryland Daily Record