Data center fires, on two separate continents, have put local government service delivery and data protection initiatives under the spotlight in their respective countries.
Today, The Times of India reported that one of the data centers holding about 20crore (a crore is 10m) personal and biometric records as part of the Indian government’s Unique ID project suffered a fire, which destroyed about 150 of the 250 servers at the facility.
The incident occurred as investigations continue into how a major fire at a Shaw Communications building housing an IBM data center in Calgary brought down a range of critical government services, and lines of communication in the city – including access to the 911 service – on 11 July.
The Times of India report said backup efforts at the Unique ID Project data center on the third floor of the Knowledge Park building in Greater Noida on Saturday meant the ID project escaped relatively unscathed.
The government has data stored in three or four backup locations including a major data center in Bangalore operated by Bharti Airtel.
The servers were destroyed by carbon soot, along with networking equipment provided by Cisco and storage equipment by EMC.
“The accident puts a big question mark over safety of data being collected from about 1.2 billion Indian residents and being housed in risk prone facilities,” the Times of India report said.
Calgary not so lucky
The government in Alberta, Canada, where the Calgary fire took place, is still looking into the knock-on affect it had on residents, government and businesses in the region.
The fire started on the 13th floor of the building managed by Shaw Communications – a large telecommunications company - in a transformer, according to Canada.com.
Services at the data center were cut off when sprinklers allegedly took down the backup system.
The data center was used for housing government services including its websites, systems to process grants and payments, registries for vehicles and licensing, hunting and health care with electronic medical records, and a range of other government services.
According to the Calgary Herald, a number of elective surgeries and 298 ambulatory procedures at Calgary hospitals and medical clinics had to be cancelled as a result of the event, which medical directors warned could take several weeks to overcome.
“The AHS computer network was knocked down for 36 hours,” the Calgary Herald report said.
It said even though systems were back up within days, medical staff had to sort through two days of paper records.
The data center also housed services for a number of international clients and telecommunications services across the state, with an estimated 4,000 residential and 16,000 business customers affected.
Calgary Emergency Management Agency Director Bruce Burrell told Canada.com the incident caused “a major telecommunications failure”.
According to the Edmonton Sun, IBM flew some records from older tape back-up to Ontario in an effort to get some systems up and running again.