Posted in
Main on June 9th, 2009 by Pingdom
The technological world we live in is often more sensitive to disruptions than people care to admit. We have often written about various kinds of incidents and outages on the Internet, as well as the occasional blackout and software bug. After all, via our uptime monitoring service we deal with downtime-related issues every single day, so it’s a fascinating subject to us.
This is a set of articles that all show Murphy’s Law in action. If things can go wrong, they will. Pretty much nothing is safe from Mr. Murphy…
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Posted in
Main on April 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom
We live in Sweden, a very organized country when it comes to things like infrastructure, electricity, etc. However, there are some countries that have a more “organic” approach to their cabling…
Here are some of the most insane examples of electrical (and phone?) cabling that we have found. Imagine being the electrician called in to fix a problem with that wiring. You’d get the wonderful opportunity to get both electrocuted AND entangled. 
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Posted in
Main on October 17th, 2008 by Pingdom
We may be screwing up Mother Nature, but she is getting back at us in her own way. And she knows we love electricity and the Internet.
Though a lot of outages are man-made, there are a huge amount of power outages directly caused by nature every year. Causes include storms and hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, and more often than not, animals too curious for their own best.
We had a look at some of the nature-made power outages so far in 2008, focusing mostly on the United States and North America, and how power outages have affected data centers and ISPs.
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Posted in
Main on May 22nd, 2008 by Pingdom
Data centers are stacked with computer equipment. All that equipment generates heat, a lot of it, which is just wasted energy. Reusing at least some of that wasted energy seems like a good idea. But first it would be nice to know how much excess heat is actually produced by a data center. IBM should [...]
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Posted in
Main on March 27th, 2008 by Pingdom
Next time your home or office has a blackout, there’s a good chance you can blame a squirrel. Tens of thousands of outages are caused every year by suicidal squirrels being where they shouldn’t be. Many power companies even place special “squirrel guards” on their equipment to try to diminish the problem. The squirrels either [...]
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Posted in
Main on January 3rd, 2008 by Pingdom
A couple of months ago, one of Rackspace’s data centers ran into trouble when a truck crashed into a power transformer and caused a major power outage. In general, power outages are a frequent cause of data center trouble and other service interruptions. Even if safeguards are in place, there is always a chance that [...]
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Posted in
Main on August 3rd, 2007 by Pingdom
Power consumption continues to be a major cost (and general head ache) for data centers. The latest numbers come from a consulting firm called the Uptime Institute. Even though server hardware energy efficiency has improved, it is being offset by the continuous increase in computing power. According to the report, computational performance in servers has [...]
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Posted in
Main on March 8th, 2007 by Pingdom
There has been a lot of discussion the last couple of years about how power costs have become a major expense for data centers. The latest entry in the debate comes from an AMD-sponsored report by Jonathan Koomey of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. According to the report, power for servers and their cooling equipment [...]
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