Power outage downs Qld govt services
Last Thursday night, a power supply interruption to a datacentre in Brisbane's CBD affected services to most Queensland government departments.
"CITEC experienced a power interruption in the evening of Thursday 10 December. Power was restored and most services were progressively returned to normal by early Friday morning (11 December)," a spokesperson for the department of public works and ICT told ZDNet.com.au.
CITEC is a state-owned entity providing IT services, including datacentre needs, to the Queensland Government. Infrastructure and network services were affected for most government departments by the outage, the spokesperson said.
After power was restored, CITEC followed a disaster recovery plan throughout the night to make sure all services were "restored as effectively and promptly as possible", according to the spokesperson.
The problem was caused by equipment failure at an electrical substation, the spokesperson reported. An investigation has begun to find out what caused the outage at the datacentre.
The hours required to get services back up and running was considered acceptable. "There were no delays in restoring the power to the datacentre... Nine hours to restore the number of systems involved is not a long time given the size and nature of the incident," the spokesperson said.
Aside from its datacentre in Brisbane's Edward Street, CITEC also has space in the newly built Polaris Datacentre in Springfield, which together with the central datacentre was intended to "easily support the split production architecture required for high availability systems". No CITEC managed datacentres besides Edward Street were affected by the outage, according to the spokesperson.
Queensland Health also suffered a power related datacentre outage earlier this year when a chilled water system failed to come back online after power had been briefly lost.