Imountain Currently Experienceing Power Outage

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Posted by imountain, 06-05-2010, 02:37 AM
Our main power is down but we are currently working on a fix with the utility company. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience.
Posted by Varadinum, 06-05-2010, 04:41 AM
Do you have a current ETA for resolution? Thanks!
Posted by vinnythejinny, 06-05-2010, 05:04 AM
yeah please keep us updated with the progress and ETA.
Posted by vinnythejinny, 06-05-2010, 06:42 AM
guys whats the update on this one?
Posted by CarSafety, 06-05-2010, 08:41 AM
Is there normally any backup or redundancy?
Posted by boyhowdy, 06-05-2010, 08:50 AM
Useful to have the forum to let us know - of course we're all eager for back-uppage, but mostly just thanks in advance for any and all updates, and for work in getting things live on a weekend!
Posted by vinnythejinny, 06-05-2010, 08:53 AM
did anyone manage to speak to them over phone for the latest update?
Posted by anawaz, 06-05-2010, 09:30 AM
I'd have thought there was power backup, etc. - doesn't happen too often. Fingers crossed and hoping we get some action soon!
Posted by Phil McKerracher, 06-05-2010, 10:03 AM
The solar panels should kick in soon...
Posted by vinnythejinny, 06-05-2010, 10:06 AM
did u get an update or its just a guess? Secondly, can solar panels power dedicated servers?
Posted by Dustin B Cisneros, 06-05-2010, 10:10 AM
Im sure they can just gotta have enough it's been hot as heck out here where Imountain is located so that's not an issue :-D
Posted by Cynixx3, 06-05-2010, 10:50 AM
I have not been able to get ahold of anyone. I believe the service was down at 11:15 last night. From what ive read and talked to them about the power is devided some is solar some is utility. I have not heard generators or seen batteries. This means when the sun is down its regular utility power and sun up solar power. To give excess power from the panels to the utility (or batteries) so that power at night is ofset by solar in the day both utility and solar have to run through one pannel. I assume this pinch point is the problem because the sun is up and there is still no power. Unfortunially until they work it out we can not contact tham by phone, email, or a support ticket because its unpowered. Lets keep our fingures crossed and hope it is fixed soon. Last edited by Cynixx3; 06-05-2010 at 10:59 AM.
Posted by GraphicLoader, 06-05-2010, 11:08 AM
This sounds like the network engineer really dropped the ball when designing in redundancy to support basic infrastructure let alone the servers. I cnat speak to the solar panel routing of power but it would seem you would be prepared to fo to the solar panels in this situation or have a generator backup for internal use. I have a VOIP PBX that I represent that will run up to 36 hours on a UPS and still power a POE switch to power the phones which as only like 12v. IF they are using VOIP then why would they host their own VOIP servers or at least have a few POTS lines to allow for internal and emergency situations such as this. On the same note even a virtualized PBX that is off site would allow call routing to designated cell phones to answer customer calls with the follow me feature. It boggles my mind why some of these larger companies that we tend to trust have no clue how to handle an emergency situation. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for them and they will seek some help from professionals. Surely someone there has an IPhone or Droid and is monitoring this thread and can give an update... Last edited by GraphicLoader; 06-05-2010 at 11:16 AM.
Posted by imountain, 06-05-2010, 12:28 PM
Sorry for the late update. At this time, we have been given an ETA of 3 hours before systems can be restored. We apologize for this grave inconvenience and we thank you for your continued patience.
Posted by vinnythejinny, 06-05-2010, 12:29 PM
almost 10 hrs now and we dont know when its gonna be up. I must say imountain is one of the best hosting service ever but todays outage is really something that they need to work on in future. I had to pause all my PPC campaigns. if anyone managed to get an update from imountain do post.
Posted by vinnythejinny, 06-05-2010, 12:34 PM
OK. they finally gave an update. now lets wait for 3 more hours. fingers crossed!
Posted by Steven, 06-05-2010, 12:42 PM
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...=627940&page=4 I thought your solar batteries could carry you through most of the night? Going to get generators any time soon? Your batteries don't seem to handle your load. 10+ hours? That is a lot of downtime. It is sunny now, are any servers coming back up from solar power?
Posted by Dustin B Cisneros, 06-05-2010, 01:26 PM
Well thing's do happend so totally understandable, but now what got's me wondering is all 4 level's of power failed?
Posted by GraphicLoader, 06-05-2010, 01:27 PM
Most eskimos will buy ice if their refrigerator is broken today and the pollution of diesel and Gas for a generator can be negated with the use of Propane as a fuel source. As I previously stated there are some serious lacks in your contingency plans for a massive power failure. For some reason the Solar Battery backups and UPS systems have you shut down and you have little or no communication because of how you have structured your phone and communication systems. If you actually had 4 levels of power backup that failed I would suggest a review of all of your power management plans and communication protocols as a 12+ hour outage is not something that instills confidence in customers, whether you are a green company or not it looks really bad. We had 13 days of power outage almost 2 years ago in Ohio and I know of several companies that weathered that storm with little to no downtime because they had good contingency plans that were well tested in place. Last edited by GraphicLoader; 06-05-2010 at 01:34 PM.
Posted by Phil McKerracher, 06-05-2010, 01:51 PM
Even the big boys like Google and Amazon have occasional outages like this when things go massively wrong. It's the frequency of them that counts, not whether they happen at all. At least this isn't due to a misconfiguration or a backup gone wrong and it's a weekend. Admittedly, the larger hosting centres do sometimes have completely redundant power and network connections (even entering the building from different directions), which imountain lack. But even then a local storm could take everything out. DNS failover to a remote location is the solution to that, but there's still a single point of failure at the DNS host.
Posted by Phil McKerracher, 06-05-2010, 01:52 PM
And they're back up just as I posted that. 12 hours downtime.
Posted by Cynixx3, 06-05-2010, 02:33 PM
Well its good to be online. There are a few things that I would like to see improved upon but that can be expected of any new equipment or setup. Hopefully iMountain will be able to gather information and improve upon designs to have a better system. I am happy that some attempts were made to notify customers and communicate possiable uptime. Also their fix was within estimated time. As far as i can tell all of my services are online and I am able to help people again before their official system is fully online. This tells me they care more about my site than theirs, and I like that. All in all, as a customer and provider under their services this was not that bad of a hit. Happened at midnight got fixed before noon on a saturday. Good response time. Now lets work on more contact and maybe a little more prevention with some testing.
Posted by anawaz, 06-05-2010, 04:08 PM
Agreed. Things seem to be working all OK now. I suppose the timing of the failure worked to most people's benefit - the fact that it was a Saturday even helped us out in the UK for some of the sites. Here's to hoping we can avoid this in the future.
Posted by CarSafety, 06-06-2010, 03:38 PM
I am also interested in what happened, given the solar batteries and other levels of backup. While 12 hours of downtime is not good, at least it happened at my least busy 12 hour period of the week. I'm more concerned about a potential for future problems of longer duration.