Hi,

The message below was sent out by SwiftGlobal about a failure at their data centre which gives a clear sign that we are not ready for public clouds as the current ones seem to have turned into storm clouds and are beating down hard.

 

Dear Customer,

This is to notify you that there will has been a power problem since Monday 27/6/2011 late afternoon at  ILH (Town) which is our redundant site. This involved a total shutdown on power  last evening as they replaced a contactor which got burnt during the day's power fluctuations. The generator was also not working to allow these electrical works to be completed.

 

During this exercise there was service interruption to all clients and services terminated at this Location i.e (co-located server, webserver). This also causing slow internet speeds due to an overload on servers at the main site. We continue to experience this interruption as they are still working on the power issue.

 

We regret the inconvenience this has caused you. Kindly bear with us as this crucial exercise is carried out we will keep you updated.

 

For any further queries, please feel free to contact our support desk on 6921000 or write to support@swiftglobal.co.ke

 

The message clearly indicates that swift have no long run power backup and are also dependent on a shared backup generator.  A data centre must been able to operate for at least 6 hours with no external power.

What is also more interesting is that the statement and sequence of  events listed by SwiftGlobal are very similar to those of KRA when there systems went down a few weeks ago.  Could this mean that apart from me there is no one else in the country with the local expertise to design a industry standard data centre?  

Regards

 

Tel: +254722511225, +254202010696