'Fire trip' behind Global Switch power issue

Technician accidentally simulates fire conditions in data centre room.

Global Switch has attributed the loss of power in part of its Sydney data centre last week to a contractor it says accidentally triggered fire safety systems.

The "fire trip" was isolated to one of Global Switch’s seven uninterruptible power supply (UPS) rooms.

In accordance with the facility’s fire safety procedures, the power distribution path supported by that UPS group failed over to a redundant group.

No fire suppression systems were triggered; however, some customers on level two lost power along that feed for more than 30 minutes.

Equipment that used two sources of power continued to function throughout the outage, but smaller, single-corded servers and network equipment went offline.

Global Switch's commercial manager Damon Reid said no service level agreements were breached, since every client had the capability to be fed by two distribution paths.

“It was an isolated set of sequences that caused an accidental fire trip by a contractor,” he said.

The data centre operator planned to continue investigating the exact set of conditions that triggered the fire trip, and would make any procedural or training changes accordingly.

PacNet, HarbourMSP, Exigent, Servers Australia, and Platform Networks were among those affected.

In an email to customers on Thursday, Platform Networks noted that it had “both internal equipment and upstream carrier interconnects affected by this power outage”.

It promised to move “any single-powered devices in our core network” to automatic transfer switches that would fail over to a backup power source.

“It should be noted that in the seven years we have used Global Switch for critical colocation services, this is the very first time we have experienced any kind of unplanned power supply related outage,” Platform Networks wrote.