Coreix Managed Servers

Managed hosting service provider Rack Force has accidentally deleted one of its customer’s decade-old databases, which contained more than 1.5 million forum posts. Impalassform.com, which is a leading automotive forum and allowed users to share information on the Chevrolet Impala, has now lost around ten year’s worth of data.

RackForce’s general manager Randall Robinson said that the error was an extremely unusual and unfortunate event. “The issue was caused by a miscommunication between the customer and one of our technical staff, which resulted in a data file being deleted,” Robinson said.

Source: Global Gold

Rackspace Hosting expects to issue customer service credits from Monday’s data centre outage of between US$2.5 million and US$3.5 million, the company has announced in an SEC filing.

A series of equipment failures contributed to the power outage at a Rackspace data centre near Dallas, where several parts of the facility lost power. The most significant failure involved a bank of generators that malfunctioned, leaving several computing clusters without backup power. Other failures involved equipment that connects the data centre to its two utility feeds, a UPS system and a transfer switch. The outage affected two of the four phases of data centre space in the facility in Grapevine, Texas.

Source: SEC

Two years after Microsoft began operating a data centre in Quincy, the city is in the midst of a multi-million-dollar project to bring recycled water to the facility. Although the city water reclamation project is costly — estimated at US$9 million — the first phase is being built with a US$4.5 million grant from the state. And the city has appealed to federal lawmakers for rest of the money.

Microsoft’s 474,000 sq ft building on 75 acres is one of three massive data centres in Quincy. Yahoo and Intuit also bought land and built large server farms. This winter, Sabey bought about 40 acres of land in Quincy and will break ground this summer on a data centre. Eventually, the city wants to provide recycled water to the three data centres there, and any others that sprout up. When complete, the water reclamation facility will be able to treat up to 5 million gallons a day.

Source: Wenatchee World

Just off the North Sea coast in the UK, Hewlett-Packard’s EDS unit has built a data centre that largely relies on cold sea air to keep servers chilled and – by doing so – cut the centre’s cooling power needs in half. The expected reduction in electricity costs, from US$15 million to US$7.5 million, is achieved through a combination of factors that may begin with a 12-foot raised floor, which is easily three to four times the height of a typical data centre raised floor.

The higher floor allowed designers to install fans 7.5 feet in diameter that bring in outside air to cool the 305,000 sq ft data centre. The larger fans are more efficient than a series of smaller fans, said Ed Kettler, an EDS fellow. EDS is the HP division that is building the data centre in Wynyard for its clients. “That is a relatively new approach as far as we can tell,” he said.

Source: Computer World