Amazon and Microsoft datacenters downed by lightning in Dublin

The status of Amazon Datacenters on the Service Health Dashboard during August let us know that a lightning strike has caused power outages at the major cloud computing data hubs for Amazon and Microsoft.

DataCenterKnowledge report that this lightning strike has caused downtime for many sites using Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, as well as users of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite). In fact,  some sites that rely on one of its storage services took between 24 and 48 hours to be fully recover.

Amazon explained “

“The transient electric deviation caused by the explosion was large enough that it propagated to a portion of the phase control system that synchronizes the backup generator plant, disabling some of them.”

Following the Twitter feeds of Microsoft, we can learn more about this issue.

When Microsoft decided to establish the huge datacenter in Dublin in September 2009, the primary reason for making a data center at Dublin was its favorable weather. Jean-philippe Courtois, Microsoft International president, said:

  “We love the Irish weather, the cool climate of Dublin was a very important consideration for us.”

As DataCenterKnowledge website said, Dublin has become a key cloud computing gateway to Europe and beyond for U.S. companies due to several factors, including the city’s location, connectivity, climate and ready supply of IT workers. Dublin’s temperature is ideal for data center cooling, allowing companies to use fresh air to cool servers instead of using huge, power-hungry chillers to refrigerate cooling water.

You can find locations on main datacenters in Dublin here : http://www.datacentermap.com/ireland/dublin/

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