Freak weather that has been described a 'once-in-a-century storm' hit Melbourne Australia over the weekend, and a local co-location provider is now reportedly facing a lawsuit from a disgruntled customer after its data center was allegedly knocked offline reports said..
The Melbourne facility (which trades as GlobalCentre) is owned by Datacom and was reportedly among the properties affected by the torrential rain and hail, which caused extensive damage to many properties in that region. CRN reported that Datacom's data center suffered a major outage after heavy rain broke a ceiling panel and poured into customers' equipment on Saturday afternoon.
However, the company has publicly denied there was an outage at the facility.
"We weren't flooded. It was a minor event," Datacom CEO, Michael Browne, told ARN. "Anyone saying its flooded is erroneous."
However, it seems Browne's position is markedly different from the first hand accounts from unnamed customers.
"People had racks full of equipment that was dead. Some techs in there were close to tears," a national voice and data carrier who spoke on condition of anonymity told CRN, which also posted a number of pictures purporting to show the storm damage in the facility.
"We only had two servers and a router die. Others came off far worse. In some neighbouring racks, people were pouring water out of power supplies and SAN equipment," the source said.
Another customer also apparently confirmed they had been off-the-air for 13 hours and was aware of yet another customer - a business associate - with water-damaged kit. And it seems that at least one customer is considering suing Datacom over the issue.
ARN said that it had been sent an anonymous email under the name Datacom Lawsuit, which refuted Browne's insistence that the data center was not flooded.
The email apparently contained a string of SMSes allegedly from Datacom's own network operation centre (NOC), which stated there was indeed flooding on the data center floor.
"The flooding is almost a secondary issue but an outage of 12 hours for a major Australian datacentre [is] completely ridiculous and negligent on their behalf," the email received by ARN reportedly said.
The sender purported to be from a Datacom customer. The sender also claimed to be a managed service provider in Melbourne and Sydney, and said the effects of the outage were "devastating" to the business.
"We've had equipment that has been fried by the apparent power surge. We've suffered more than 17 hours of downtime, more downtime than we have had in the history of the company," the email to ARN said. "Water damage, loss of power, equipment damage. What else could have gone wrong?
"We pay Datacom thousands of dollars every month to do two basic things: Keep our equipment safe and keep power running and it has failed on all levels."
At the time of reporting Datacom continued to say that the facility was not flooded, but according to ARN, Browne has apparently admitted "there might have been some leakage intrusion".
This is not the first time that flooding has hit a data center.
Back in July 2008, a drain pipe failure at the Lucas Oil Stadium in the United States flooded the data center at the stadium with several feet of water.
A year earlier severe flooding in Seattle reportedly flooded a T-Mobile data center in Bothell, Washington.