Air conditioner failure causes Dimension Data data centre outage

That isn't a data centre in Victory Park. Its a converted eighties office block. I had an office right next to it. Freddie met die Ford, Dannie met die Datsun, en Makatini met die Mahindra would rock up with their tools and overalls to do the maintenance there.
Its a wonder it hasn't gone TITSUP more often.
 
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quovadis said:
I admit I’ve seen a couple of fans at doors but daisy chained would be a new one.
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DIY windtunnel when your DC doesn't have windows (hello basement DC)

Also similar method to dry after flooding
 
Hmm, our substations have redundant hvacs feeding from seperate boards able to tie into the other automatically should shtf. We may not be running servers, but let me tell you a room full of big vfds gets nice and toasty real quick was doing maintenance on one and the controller on the other decided its a good day to die.

Halfway in was not a good place to be, so I started ripping out the working one. By the time I had her running most of the drives already started giving temp alarms, fortunately nothing tripped. Took that poor thing a good whike to get things back to 18 degrees. Next project is an " idgaf if you freeze hell over" keyed switch wired in lol
 
Afrihost Used the same excuse. f..k them all
 
We installed a cooling system alarm at UCT Chemeng Server room. During a load-shedding, the generator did not start and all 4 people who received over-temperature notifications did nothing about it

The damage came to just over R5.5m. UCT’s attorneys attitude was that we should have been more pro-active about it and even said we should have gone in and shut the system down

Trouble is, we did not have keys to the building

There is always a concerted attempt to shift blame
 
Mystic Twilight said:
They probably had a few hundred in the back being unboxed every 10 minutes to switch out when the current ones died after giving 1000% effort to cool all those servers through the single hose.
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That hose is the exhaust for the hot air. Those portable aircons are not very efficient.
Cold air coming out around the blue circle:
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[XC] Oj101 said:
Dimension Data operates 11 data centres on the African continent, nine of which are in South Africa, including Johannesburg, Cape Town, Umhlanga near Durban, Gqeberha (East London), and Port Elizabeth.

I thought Gqeberha was PE.
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It is.
 
r00igev@@r said:
That isn't a data centre in Victory Park. Its a converted eighties office block. I had an office right next to it. Freddie met die Ford, Dannie met die Datsun, en Makatini met die Mahindra would rock up with their tools and overalls to do the maintenance there.
Its a wonder it hasn't gone TITSUP more often.
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In their defense the upstairs DC is not as bad as downstairs (the wild west). I've spent many years working in DC's with many of SA's hosting providers and where we host our equipment is far from the worst.

Optinet's network is rock solid and when you do manage to get a decent engineer to assist they are bloody good.

This is the first major issue that we have had since we moved from the wild west into our own dedicated racks and its been close to a decade now.
 
Jade @ Absolute Hosting said:
In their defense the upstairs DC is not as bad as downstairs (the wild west). I've spent many years working in DC's with many of SA's hosting providers and where we host our equipment is far from the worst.

Optinet's network is rock solid and when you do manage to get a decent engineer to assist they are bloody good.

This is the first major issue that we have had since we moved from the wild west into our own dedicated racks and its been close to a decade now.
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Tried to once sell DiData IoT sensors for their DC. The DC manager said he did not want it as he has some hard wired LEDs on a panel which was in front of the security guard who would phone if there was a problem.

This is the company that blue chip companies in South Africa rely for on their IT advice. The mind boggles.

Just because you have been lucky does not mean you have good operations. It just means you just lucky.

Most of these guys would not even have proper power resilience with extended run times if it was not for loadshedding.
 
Jade @ Absolute Hosting said:
Whats going on here?

View attachment 1378127
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I saw that and just left it in the screen shot. Not much to disclose there. :laugh:
I use Waterfox, Lastpass, ublock origin and DTA. Niche browser that no-one is going to bother to hack.
Also use rport and uptime kuma. There are always a few fibre faults, power outages and LTE links down. Hate LTE - absolute rubbish.
uptime kuma reports and logs the faults automatically with the ISPs. It integration into nearly every messaging platform available.
 
r00igev@@r said:
Tried to once sell DiData IoT sensors for their DC. The DC manager said he did not want it as he has some hard wired LEDs on a panel which was in front of the security guard who would phone if there was a problem.
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I wonder if he wasn't referring to the other DC's that were owned by IS, as I have not seen any screens in front of the security guards other than tetris and youtube - and they apparently cant dial out?

Now may be the time to reach out to them again to see if they are interested in such devices.

Mind pinging me with the details of those, I might be interested in setting up such devices in our racks
r00igev@@r said:
I saw that and just left it in the screen shot. Not much to disclose there. :laugh:
I use Waterfox, Lastpass, ublock origin and DTA. Niche browser that no-one is going to bother to hack.
Also use rport and uptime kuma. There are always a few fibre faults, power outages and LTE links down. Hate LTE - absolute rubbish.
uptime kuma reports and logs the faults automatically with the ISPs. It integration into nearly every messaging platform available.
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I was teasing you :)
 
Jade @ Absolute Hosting said:
I wonder if he wasn't referring to the other DC's that were owned by IS, as I have not seen any screens in front of the security guards other than tetris and youtube - and they apparently cant dial out?

Now may be the time to reach out to them again to see if they are interested in such devices.

Mind pinging me with the details of those, I might be interested in setting up such devices in our racks

I was teasing you :)
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It was in what they classify as the fancy pants DC at the Campus. The one where they label x-connects using discarded twisted pair and that hasn't ever seen a vacuum cleaner.:laugh::ROFL:
I've send you a ping.
 
[XC] Oj101 said:
Dimension Data operates 11 data centres on the African continent, nine of which are in South Africa, including Johannesburg, Cape Town, Umhlanga near Durban, Gqeberha (East London), and Port Elizabeth.

I thought Gqeberha was PE.
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Yes it is. East London is called something else (that nobody remembers!).
 
dustinbordeleau5 said:
Hey there! It's unfortunate to hear about the cooling system failure at Dimension Data's data centre. HVAC issues can really disrupt operations. If you experienced a similar problem and needed reliable HVAC repair services at that time, I hope you were able to find a trusted provider in your area.
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Door to door aircon salesman i suppose
 
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