The UK’s Guardian newspaper reported that Twitter was unavailable for users worldwide, with the social media site suffering a total outage followed by serious access problems lasting over an hour.
Even in the early days of the service, Twitter outages were common enough that the company’s “over capacity” error message gained a nickname – the fail whale, says Jonathan Arnold, managing director at Volta Data Centres.
Unplanned outages can cost organisations a lot of money and even though it’s unavoidable, planning can help restore operations sooner and moderate the impact on most organisations.
Resiliency is a planned part of a data centre’s architecture and is usually linked with other disaster planning and disaster-recovery considerations.
Data centre resiliency is usually achieved through the use of redundant components or systems. When one of these fails or experiences some form of disruption, the redundant element takes over seamlessly and continues to support computing services. In an ideal world, users of a resilient system never know that a disruption has even occurred.
Here at Volta, we are different, offering a level of resilience that is unparalleled in central London. We have two wholly owned and dedicated 33kV transformers onsite, which are fed by two separate redundant grid rings at 33kV each, providing a level of power resilience that no other central London facility can match.
In the unlikely event that both of these grid rings were to fail, UPS, batteries and our resilient backup generators will ensure that there’s no disruption.
In recognition of the unparalleled level of resilience that we offer at our central London data centre, we launched our Platinum Power Service Level Agreement (SLA) last year.
This is ideal for companies who require the guarantee of 100% uptime. Should our Platinum customers ever lose full power availability (no matter how briefly) they will receive a year’s free service.
The author of this blog is Jonathan Arnold, managing director at Volta Data Centres.
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