If you’ve been following the cloud space at all you’ll know that hosting provider Rackspace recently lost power twice within a span of 10 days. As NetworkWorld explained:
Power outages on June 29 and July 7 hit Rackspace’s 144,000-square-foot data center in the Dallas suburb of Grapevine. Rackspace operates nine data centers worldwide for about 60,000 customers. Within the Dallas facility, some customers experienced downtime of about 40 minutes on June 29 and on July 7 some customers suffered downtime of 15 to 20 minutes.
During the outages, as information became available Rackspace communicated updates via phone, twitter and their corporate blog.
Last week, two days after the second outage they posted both a blog update as well as this 5 minute video in which their president Lanham Napier explains what happened and what they plan to do about it:
I’m impressed with the way the company has handled these situations and I think its impressive that their president will be working from the Dallas site until the situation is resolved. As he explains, there is no way that you ever going to completely eliminate unplanned downtime. The important thing is how you keep this at a minimum and how you handle and correct an outage when it does occur.
And the rest?
Rackspace is doing quite a bit to make sure that their Dallas facility is fixed and fortified. What I’d also like to hear from them is how they plan to proactively audit their other eight facilities around the world to make sure they are all up to speed.
After the Dallas dust settles maybe its time to make another video?
Extra credit Reading/Listening:
- An Interview with Lanham Napier from last year about hosting and cloud computing.
Pau for now…
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