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Continuum Power Failures and lack of communication, again
| Posted by MACscr, 07-12-2011, 12:39 AM |
Ok, at 8am CST my servers at Continuum lost power, but were back up within minutes. Again, tonight at about 10:30pm CST, one of my servers lost its power, but another one in the same rack was fine. I spoke with a friend that has rack in another room at the DC that lost all his servers this morning and only a few tonight as well. Very odd. So anyway, I found no thread listed on WHT about the issue and no emails have been sent out by the DC. I submitted a ticket around noon and received the following reply:
Quote:
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We should have an RFO issued shortly to those customers affected. The issue was not widespread, and at this time, an exact cause has not been fully determined. Electrical engineers are on site investigating.
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Though this was communication I had to initiate myself and as of now 11:30 CST, there hasnt been any info sent out to us as promised. These power issues are getting ridiculous (ts at least once every 6 months) and there are network issues more often than their should be as well. The part that drives me mad is the lack of communication on their part in keeping customers informed and the blatant disregard for the health of our equipment. Its also extremely obvious that their power failover design is an utter mess and never seems to work. If it ever did, they obviously failed to communicate the incident. They stated that they had built other data centers for clients in the past, which would make me think they knew what they were doing, but I am starting to think these other DC's might have been more of the type of FDC =P.
If they dont decide to start running a professional DC, do we have better options in the Chicago region that are similar in their offerings and price points? |
| Posted by spaethco, 07-12-2011, 01:22 AM |
I have 2 1U servers colo'd there and both lost power at 8:02, 8:08, 22:26 CDT today.
The most annoying part about it is I have all my important stuff mirrored to another DC, so I could easily leave a few things shutdown if I had any indication that further power events might be coming.
I restored everything this afternoon because I got a ticket reply of "We do not anticipate any more related issues as this appears to have been an isolated event."
Now I get to look forward to cleaning up FS corruption due to an unclean shutdown.  |
| Posted by cmscentral, 07-12-2011, 01:28 AM |
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My servers are still down. |
| Posted by pentiumone133, 07-12-2011, 09:15 AM |
I have lost power twice now in the last day or so.
In continuum's defense, we have had some pretty large power outages in the Chicago suburbs due to some large storms. The town next to mine has some areas that wont have power until Friday. |
| Posted by xguju, 07-12-2011, 02:58 PM |
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One server I have with them has been down since yesterday 8 a.m. not sure what to do because the support desk has been extremely delayed (4-6 hour response times) and the support team in general has been inattentive and understaffed. Any other place to switch services to? |
| Posted by Violent Injection, 07-12-2011, 03:10 PM |
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My servers are offline right now no clue why. |
| Posted by NetDepot - Terrence, 07-12-2011, 03:12 PM |
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Did you try contacting them to find out what the issue might be? |
| Posted by Violent Injection, 07-12-2011, 03:16 PM |
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Called, Skyped, and made ticket for today's granted it was only about 20 mins ago this new one happened. I made a ticket yesterday about the power one but they gave me the default one you see from OP's post nothing else. |
| Posted by xguju, 07-12-2011, 03:16 PM |
Quote:
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Originally Posted by THAMAN
Did you try contacting them to find out what the issue might be?
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Support staff is not as quick or as translucent as you would expect it to be. They did not even inform me that they had a power outage. I had to find out on my own. |
| Posted by scooby2, 07-12-2011, 04:07 PM |
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Does Continuum not have UPS and Generator backup? I thought they had both but it does not seem like it with these outages. |
| Posted by spaethco, 07-12-2011, 04:14 PM |
The outages are brief and not global, so I don't think it's a UPS / site generator issue. The power also comes back too quickly for it to be a breaker issue that requires manual reset.
It feels like a bug / exploit with the switched PDUs (the outlets the servers plug into), but that's purely spit-balling on my behalf in the absence of data. |
| Posted by MACscr, 07-12-2011, 10:23 PM |
Thought a server went down again today, but just checked the uptime and it hasnt. Must have been a monitoring failure. Doh!
I have still yet to see anything from continuum though on yesterdays outages. |
| Posted by Dougy, 07-12-2011, 10:50 PM |
Quote:
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Originally Posted by MACscr
Thought a server went down again today, but just checked the uptime and it hasnt. Must have been a monitoring failure. Doh!
I have still yet to see anything from continuum though on yesterdays outages.
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I heard there was a RFO sent out, not for public release.. |
| Posted by MACscr, 07-13-2011, 01:28 AM |
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Dougy
I heard there was a RFO sent out, not for public release..
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Yep, I received it shortly after I submitted my last comment here. The RFO definitely didnt give me any good feelings that it wont happen again in 6 months. |
| Posted by scooby2, 07-13-2011, 09:58 AM |
Quote:
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Originally Posted by MACscr
Thought a server went down again today, but just checked the uptime and it hasnt. Must have been a monitoring failure. Doh!
I have still yet to see anything from continuum though on yesterdays outages.
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It was some kind of network outage. Not sure if it was power related or not. I monitor from two separate services now and both confirmed the outage however said server was not rebooted. |
| Posted by pentiumone133, 07-13-2011, 10:15 AM |
Third time's a charm. looks like that last power outage last night (third one so far) has done some damage to my filesystems.
This sucks. |
| Posted by Continuum, 07-13-2011, 11:22 PM |
Quote:
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Originally Posted by MACscr
Ok, at 8am CST my servers at Continuum lost power, but were back up within minutes. Again, tonight at about 10:30pm CST, one of my servers lost its power, but another one in the same rack was fine. I spoke with a friend that has rack in another room at the DC that lost all his servers this morning and only a few tonight as well. Very odd. So anyway, I found no thread listed on WHT about the issue and no emails have been sent out by the DC. I submitted a ticket around noon and received the following reply:
Though this was communication I had to initiate myself and as of now 11:30 CST, there hasnt been any info sent out to us as promised. These power issues are getting ridiculous (ts at least once every 6 months) and there are network issues more often than their should be as well. The part that drives me mad is the lack of communication on their part in keeping customers informed and the blatant disregard for the health of our equipment. Its also extremely obvious that their power failover design is an utter mess and never seems to work. If it ever did, they obviously failed to communicate the incident. They stated that they had built other data centers for clients in the past, which would make me think they knew what they were doing, but I am starting to think these other DC's might have been more of the type of FDC =P.
If they dont decide to start running a professional DC, do we have better options in the Chicago region that are similar in their offerings and price points?
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Mac,
I'm not sure who guaranteed you an RFO the same day as the incident, but that was never our intention. We did state an RFO was to be released after a full investigation of the incident. The RFO was released the following day, which in my opinion, is well within acceptable ranges.
Our critical infrastructure (UPS and Gen sets) is well maintained, well designed and tested weekly, monthly and yearly. Unfortunately, regardless of how well you test, mechanical equipment can be prone to failure. But, I can guarantee you that our equipment is well maintained and tested regularly.
We take our uptime and the infrastructure to your equipment very seriously. Anyone who has worked with us, for any period of time, knows we make every effort to ensure our customers equipment is secure and maintained in a clean, reliable Tier II data center environment.
We have built multiple Tier III+ premium data centers. Our most recent build was 100k sq. ft. and serviced some of the largest (Fortune 100) national and international clients. We sold that Data Center (Stargate) to Latisys (MDH) in 2008, prior to forming Continuum. A quick Google search can confirm.
We run a very professional DC and I'm confident in the service we provide to our customers on a day to day basis. We take each outage very seriously and make every effort to provide the best service possible to our clients.
We were communicating with customers as quickly as possible on an individual basis. Are there areas for communication improvement? Of course. There is always room for improvement.
As always, if you, or anyone, have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach me directly.
Tom |
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