Wikipedia suffers online failure due to overheating servers

11th May 2010


Towards the end of March online encyclopedia Wikipedia suffered a global service shutdown following an overheating problem in the company's European data centre.

 

Around 50 servers dedicated to Wikipedia, located in Amsterdam's EvoSwitch data centre closed themselves down to prevent overheating following a failure of the installation's cooling system.

 

Green data centre

 

The EvoSwitch data centre boasts 20 megawatts of power capacity generated exclusively from sustainable energy sources. Using a combination of wind and solar power and biomass the facility also utilises free cooling - known as fresh air economisation - to reduce the amount of power used for air conditioning.

 

As an organisation that exists purely by donation and for information purposes only, downtime for Wikipedia is not too detrimental. However, it would a totally different story for any major e-commerce concern that would inevitably suffer the double whammy of damage to the company's reputation and reduced revenues during the outage.

 

Monitoring environmental conditions

 

DPS director Theo Spittel explains how such potentially damaging outages can be minimised: "Using Environmental Monitoring devices allows operators to become aware of any potential overheating in the data centre, and take corrective action well before servers close themselves down.

 

"For example, our environmental monitoring products can be set to trigger an alarm response following a temperature increase of only one degree, immediately notifying operators via remote monitoring that there is a potential problem.

 

"Although we are uncertain of EvoSwitch's monitoring arrangements, we know that by deploying a number of DPS environmental sensors throughout their data centre it would have been possible to determine the universal rise in the installation's temperature. Operators would have been alerted to the nature of the problem well before the servers closed down.

 

"In addition, our environmental sensors can also detect the presence of smoke and water, as well as monitoring humidity, airflow, sound and light in the data centre."

 

Big impact on reputation and revenues

 

Although this case of server shutdown may not have a lasting effect to Wikipedia's reputation or revenues, would that be the case in the majority of commercial data centres?

 

For more information on products that monitor server room conditions visit our Environmental Monitoring page or call us on 01823 275100.