Media Temple Outage
Out of context: Reply #6
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- justjeff0
I'm the last one to brag about media temple (disclaimer: i work for a different hosting company), but they didn't have a single generator, and this type of failure has nothing to do with them - it's their datacenter, and it happens to be a very respected datacenter.
Mediatemple is at Alchemy.
Alchemy is in the Garland Building in downtown LA.
The Garland building datacenter was designed for banks and telcos - it really is a very good datacenter.There are 5 generators, though due to the volume of electrical equiptment, it's likely that 4 or 5 MUST be running for power to stay on. If a single generator fails, then load increases, you get brownouts, and equipment damaged.
If you take their notifications at face value (that is, if you believe everything on the page as gospel), then they had generators, but not enough, or they weren't tested properly, or a part just failed, which you really can't prevent except by buying more generators and building some redundancy into the redundant power system..
Getting generation right is tricky - testing is a difficult task (try telling a bank you're going to test your generators, and you MAY knock them offline, but you HOPE that you won't - see what they say), and you never really know when you're going to get tested.
At least the outage, as described, is better than my original guess (based on a history of dealing with datacenters and generators) - I would have actually assumed they ran out of diesel, because they had been on for some time after the initial DWP outage.