(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Following a high-profile power outage last week in Texas, hosting provider Rackspace Hosting (www.rackspace.com) had another power outage at its Dallas-Fort Worth data center, leaving customers without network access for a short period of time.
According to Rackspace’s blog, at about 11am local time on Tuesday, an electrical connection failed, causing a brief power interruption to customers on UPS cluster A, which may have also triggered intermittent network performance issues for customers supported by UPS clusters B and E for a short time. Cluster A customer servers were powered by the generator within minutes.
By 8pm, a portion of the data center was running on generator power, as technicians worked to replace the failed part and move that portion of the data center back over to utility power, according to Rackspace’s blog.
“Specifically, the part that failed is called a bus duct, which is composed of straps or tubes of metal used to conduct large amounts of electricity,” Rackspace web developer Eric Johnson wrote in a company blog post Tuesday. “Because a data center consumes substantial amounts of electricity, bus ducts are commonly used in the power infrastructure. In our Dallas-Fort Worth data center, the bus duct failure caused downtime for customer servers that are supported by UPS cluster A….Customers supported by UPS cluster A are currently being powered by generators, which are running reliably and predictably.”
By early Wednesday morning, Rackspace had installed and tested a temporary bridge that carries power from UPS cluster A to the power distribution units and the cabinets and servers. This temporary bridge is the first part of the two-phase bus duct replacement process. The second phase is the installation of a new bus duct, which is being manufactured and is expected to be flown to the facility for installation by Wednesday night.
Rackspace said it is still investigating why the bus duct failed and why customers experienced downtime as a result.
The Tuesday downtime was an all-too-soon reminder of a 45 minute outage that affected part of Rackspace’s Dallas-Fort Worth data center at the end of June, which was particularly interesting because it attracted the attention of not only tech pundits and bloggers, but also more traditional celebrities including pop singer Justin Timberlake, who posted a Twitter message about the web hosting outage.
This negative attention has had a detrimental effect on Rackspace’s shares, which fell 2.9 percent to $12.52 in recent trading, after dropping as much as 7.3 percent earlier, according to Dow Jones Newswires. Having more than doubled since the year’s start, Rackspace’s share prices were on their way up since its initial public offering last fall.
Chief Executive Lanham Napier told Dow Jones Newswires that the recent slip-ups could cost Rackspace between $2.5 million and $3.5 million in credit to its customers due to its 100 percent network and infrastructure uptime guarantee, which offers a credit worth 5 percent of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of infrastructure downtime.
