Wikipedia Back Up After Server Meltdown

“Wikipedia back up after server meltdown” – outage Wednesday, March 23 at 2:45 pm (ET) at Wikipedia’s European Data Center….

At Viridity Software, we talk to data center managers, IT directors, facilities’ management, and industry consultants all the time.  We often share our favorite “war stories”.  Like  the one about the huge financial services company that bought over $25M (yes, million) of high-end storage and took delivery only to find out that they didn’t have enough electricity to power (or cool) the equipment.  Or most recently, an industry consultant shared his story with us about a client who experienced a data center outage across the entire facility after tripping a power distribution unit (PDU) that resulted in a cascading event simply due to not having enough available power for multiple PDUs to be in charge mode at the same time.   The list of war stories is long, but somehow you always think it cannot happen to you.

Well, apparently Wikipedia found out on March 23rd that it could happen to you.  I am sure that Wikipedia is using state-of-the-art everything in their data center to deliver their world-class website and service. But, the fact that they did have an “overheating” situation that led to a server shut down and then to failed failover (yes, a failover that didn’t work) is both unfortunate and mind-boggling.

Lets face it…the current state of IT is to react to issues versus proactively manage which results in situations like this one.  To IT’s defense, vendors are chronically pushing solutions on them that may or may not pay off, are complex to deploy, and are typically very costly.

Further, it is amazing that basic IT tools to help better understand power consumption and cooling are generally not available.  As a result, most IT pros will admit that they have no idea about consumption, hot spots, or available capacity in a given rack. 

Don’t let what happened to Wikipedia happen to you.If you are being asked (or mandated) to understand your power consumption down to the server or device, take a look at Viridity EnergyCenter software.  It installs in minutes and within an hour or two after launching your initial discovery, you will be amazed at the information you get back that can help your data center be more efficient right away.

-- Steve Keilen, VP of Marketing, Viridity Software