Fire brings down datacenters in India and Canada

On August, 8, 2012, the The Times of India report:

A fire in the lower floors of a Greater Noida building which houses the data centre of the government’s ambitious Unique ID Project has put at risk the personal and biometric records of 20 crore Indian residents.

The servers were destroyed by carbon soot, along with networking equipment provided by Cisco and storage equipment by EMC.

“The accident puts a big question mark over safety of data being collected from about 1.2 billion Indian residents and being housed in risk prone facilities,” the Times of India report said.

At the same time, on the other side of the planet, Canada.com report an explosion in an electrical room at Shaw Communications’ downtown headquarters – a large telecommunications company.

The data center was used for housing government services including its websites, systems to process grants and payments, registries for vehicles and licensing, hunting and health care with electronic medical records, and a range of other government services.

The data center also housed services for a number of international clients and telecommunications services across the state, with an estimated 4,000 residential and 16,000 business customers affected.