Data Center Backup Generator Kicks In During Power Outage and Catches Fire

Joe_Dragon shares a report from The Register: A power outage kicked off a fire in web hosting biz WebNX's Ogden data center in Utah on Sunday, knocking the facility offline temporarily and leaving several servers in need of a rebuild. Kevin Brown, Fire Marshal for the US city's Fire Department told The Register in a phone interview that firefighters responded to a call on Sunday evening. The fire, he said, 'originated in a generator in the building and spread to several servers.' Brown said the facility's fire suppression system contained the blaze and that fire department personnel assisted with the cleanup. He said power was cut to the building until an electrical engineer could inspect the facility to make sure current could be restored safely, which he added is standard procedure. He also confirmed that some of Ogden City's IT services were down on Sunday and Monday as a result of the data center fire. 'Sunday afternoon the city power was disrupted and, as designed, our backup generators automatically switched on,' the company said in a Facebook post. 'However, during that transition, one of our backup generators that had been recently tested and benchmarked specifically for this situation experienced a catastrophic failure, caught fire, and as a result initiated the fire suppression protocol.'

'Some servers will have an extended outage as they may require rebuilds due to some water damage. Those builds have a high probability that data is intact.' They added: 'Customer's servers in one of our main bays were exposed to water and possible damage may have occurred. No fire damage was inflicted on customer servers.'

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