A data center migration at ValueWeb has gone badly, leaving thousands of sites offline, some for as long as three days. The migration involved moving several thousand dedicated servers from Affinity Internet’s Miami, Fla. hosting facility to a Hostway data center in Tampa, about 270 miles away. The servers were leased by customers of ValueWeb and Gate.com, two business units of Affinity, which was
acquired by Hostway [1] in April.
The move, which began Friday night, was scheduled to take 12 to 15 hours. But by late Sunday night many customers reported that their
sites remained offline [2]. A
forum post [3] by a Gate.com manager indicates that all servers had been connected and powered on in the new location by 2 pm Sunday, but acknowledged that servers remained offline. Customers posting in a
discussion thread at Digg [4]said they were still down early Tuesday morning, more than three days after the migration started.
Among the sites knocked offline by the migration was HTML Help, a popular reference site for web site developers. “HTMLHelp’s two dedicated servers were offline for over 75 hours,” site maintainer John Pozadzides
reported [5]. “The worst part was that the company failed to communicate to anyone during the longer than expected outage as they went completely silent – at times not answering customer service phone calls, and sending no status update e-mails.”
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com
URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/07/31/data-center-migration-goes-awry-at-valueweb/
URLs in this post:
[1] acquired by Hostway: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/04/04/hostway_acquires_affinity_internet.html
[2] sites remained offline: http://forum.valueweb.com/showthread.php?t=1344
[3] forum post: http://forum.gate.com/showthread.php?t=959
[4] discussion thread at Digg : http://digg.com/tech_news/How_not_to_migrate_a_data_center
[5] reported: http://blog.htmlhelp.com/2007/07/30/hostway-valueweb-server-outage/
[6] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/
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