In all, with 100% uptime for my systems for 4 years now, I have a hard time complaining about a freak occurance like this. And beyond that, they’ve had like 7 years total of uptime.

100% SLA is awesome, but we all know that is an ideal and things do break regardless of the amount of testing and planning, even if infrequently. What really counts is the response that we received from Rackspace. Proactively turning off our servers and notifying us is way better than the overheated failing servers we’ve had in the past.

The bottom line is that the response was Fanatical, and I am confident in the RS team to find room for improvement.

It is certainly a wakeup call for all of us who might have believed the 100% ‘guarantee’ — but, then again, is there anyone who’s better? If not, then we have to do our own mirroring etc systems, and the whole Web2.0 thing just became a lot more expensive to set up properly.

I think RS *could* have done much better at communication, but they were pretty good at answering the phone and whatnot.

Although I don’t really like interacting with the sales side of RS, their techs are TOP notch. I sleep very well knowing my servers are at Rackspace. Won’t consider moving them one bit.

They shut down our servers due to the heat at the datacenter. From what we understand:
In the second incident at approximately 6:30 PM CST Monday, a vehicle struck and brought down the transformer feeding power to the DFW data center. It immediately disrupted power to the entire data center and our emergency generators kicked in and operated as intended. When we transferred power to our secondary utility power system, the data center’s chilling units were cycled back up. At this time, however, the utility provider shut down power in order to allow emergency rescue teams safe access to the accident victim. This repeated cycling of the chillers resulted in increasing temperatures within the data center. As a precautionary measure we decided to take some customers’ servers offline. These servers are now back up, as are the chillers.

So it seems as the redudant systems worked. With power and all, but the chillers failed when they had to cylce them multiple times because of the accident victim.

Although all of our servers and our imaged suffered, I can’t say enough good things about rackspace and what they’ve done for us. I mean, with all my experiences with datacenters (esp The Planet) they handled everything as best as I can ask for. They’ve gone above and beyond with any support request me and my team have had and they are simply… Fanatitcal as much as I can expect them to be.

Thank you for taking up for Rackspace.

Please also note the only reason why the chillers failed is b/c the Utility company actually shut down all power in order to safely remove the accident victim.

Just another small reminder from the tech deities that computing is not a constant, and as was posted earlier, even a utility can fail.

please keep us posted

Jon