With the first floor of its damaged Houston data center still without power, The Planet is now offering to physically migrate customer servers to another data center it operates in the city. The dedicated server provider made the offer this morning after a generator failure delayed the restoration of power to the first floor of its H1 data center, which suffered extensive damage in an electrical explosion and fire Saturday night. With no firm timetable for the completion of generator repairs, The Planet offered to move customer servers between data centers:
We understand the difficult situation this causes for our customers. As such, we are offering to move all H1 Phase 1 customers to our H2 data center here in Houston. This requires physically moving servers to our data center, which is approximately three miles away from the H1 data center. It also requires IP address changes for all servers relocated to H2.
The Planet says it has a replacement part for the generator, but the migration offer may be welcomed by customers in Phase I (the first floor of the Houston facility) whose web sites have been unavailable for more than three days.
In the latest update, The Planet provided additional details on the generator problems:
This morning at approximately 2:45 a.m. CST, the temporary generator supplying power to the servers and environmental control systems located in Phase 1 of our H1 facility shut down. This was caused by some faulty current sensors in the output breaker. The sensors detected an out of balance current condition that did not exist. Technicians from the generator company were onsite within 15 minutes. After working on the breaker for an hour, they believed the issue was remedied, and the generator was restarted. As the servers and environmental control systems were brought back online, the breaker again caused the generator to trip offline. At this time we have a replacement breaker in route to the site and will get power restored as soon as physically possible.
The company says it has additional staff on hand to support the migrations, which are being conducted on a first-come, first served basis. "Estimated time to have your server moved depends on the volume of requests we have," the company said.
