MTN Business DC outage
MTN Business’ Gallo Manor data centre has experienced prolonged downtime today after an electricity and generator failure. The downtime started at around 13:30 on Wednesday, and the issue was resolved around half an hour later.
According to MTN Business’ Edwin Thompson an Eskom power failure at 14:30 meant that the data centre relied on generator power this afternoon. Unfortunately the main generator ‘blew itself up’ which impacted the electricity infrastructure at the facility. While the power and generator system for the facility is fully redundant, Thompson explained that it is not really possible to prepare for these types of unexpected events.
The Gallo Manor data centre is a key hosting facility in South Africa with numerous large clients like iBurst and Hetzner. The downtime therefore does not only affect websites like MyBroadband, but also hosted services like authentication & billing for iBurst and hosted PBX solutions.
This is however not the first time that electricity problems crippled the MTN Business data centre. Earlier this year an outage caused by a circuit breaker, and a subsequent ‘managed’ shutdown of the data centre during daytime to address the issue, caused severe problems for providers like iBurst and Hetzner.
iBurst CEO Jannie van Zyl said that these outages have a very negative impact on his business, not only because of the inconvenience caused to his customers but also because it directly impacts on the functioning of his business. iBurst is however in the process of creating a redundant hosting and network centre at their Sandton offices which will be used as a failover facility in the case of any DC downtimes.
This downtime came only hours after Internet Solutions experienced a short downtime in their Bryanston data centre in Johannesburg. The IS downtime seemed to have been caused by server problems which affected the company’s Access, Hosting Backbone and MPLS VPN Backbone services.
MTN Business DC downtime – discussion
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