The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Interesting Times
Wednesday - May 31, 2006 12:36 PM in
We've had a few interesting days here in the VocaLabs Operations Center. Our main database server has been getting close to the end of its life, and starting to become unreliable.
Last Friday we ordered a pair of replacement servers--we're dividing the functions of our single current server among two new more-powerful machines--which should arrive next week.
But over the weekend we had a bout of unusually hot weather here in Minneapolis. It got close to 100 degrees downtown, compared to the more typical mid-70's for this time of year. This heat wave overwhelmed the cooling systems in the colocation facility where our servers are located. A data center which is supposed to be maintained at 65 to 70 degrees soared to 80-90 degrees.
This caused our creaky database server to shut down repeatedly over the holiday weekend. And the only way to restart it when it overheats is to physically turn off its power, give it time to cool down, and turn it back on. Dan Taylor, our head of operations, spent much of his long weekend driving out to our server rack to restart the server.
Fortunately the weather has moderated considerably, and we've moved our database off of the old hardware onto a temporary server until the new machines arrive. So things are (mostly) stable again.
As for Dan, he's been given an extra couple of vacation days to make up for his lost holiday.
Posted by Peter Leppik
But over the weekend we had a bout of unusually hot weather here in Minneapolis. It got close to 100 degrees downtown, compared to the more typical mid-70's for this time of year. This heat wave overwhelmed the cooling systems in the colocation facility where our servers are located. A data center which is supposed to be maintained at 65 to 70 degrees soared to 80-90 degrees.
This caused our creaky database server to shut down repeatedly over the holiday weekend. And the only way to restart it when it overheats is to physically turn off its power, give it time to cool down, and turn it back on. Dan Taylor, our head of operations, spent much of his long weekend driving out to our server rack to restart the server.
Fortunately the weather has moderated considerably, and we've moved our database off of the old hardware onto a temporary server until the new machines arrive. So things are (mostly) stable again.
As for Dan, he's been given an extra couple of vacation days to make up for his lost holiday.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 12:36 PM by | | | |