There has been a media fervour following news of a major power outage at Orcon's data center on Auckland's North Shore last Monday (26 February).
According to reports, a truck loaded with concrete hit a pole carrying an 11,000V line feeding the Vector Northcote Telehousing Centre, cutting power at 5.30am. A Vector spokesman said that mains power was restored four hours later, with electricity being restored in stages to the racks in the data center during the day.
A number of companies who use the data center have said they are considering their custom with Orcon following this second major' incident. In mid-January ('Heatwave affects New Zealand data center', 17 January, www.zdtweb.com), the facility became overheated with temperatures reaching 30┬║C, affecting the operation of some servers. Despite claims to the contrary, two servers were knocked off-line.
One such customer is Silverstripe, a developer of open-sourced web applications. According to their company blog: Unfortunately several of our websites and mail service went down for much of this morning after someone crashed their car and took power away from the Orcon datacenter. This outage affected thousands of websites and only a small percentage were SilverStripe related. We treat this a serious problem because this is the second time in a year that Orcon diesel generators have failed--so in addition to us reminding Orcon of their contractual obligations we are we are working with Nucleus to spread our services across networks.'