One Summer Street Data Center Fire

Data center outages are not at all uncommon, and because of that we don’t bring your attention to them on a regular basis. However, this writer has seen firsthand the “no expense spared” architecture at Boston’s One Summer Street, so when Markley Group’s impressive flagship data center – the largest colocation facility in New England with almost 1 million square feet – had a fire late Friday, it grabbed our attention.

According to Universal hub and other sources, there was a small fire on the 8th floor where UPS systems are housed causing sprinkler system activation. Whether this is entirely correct or not, we cannot confirm, however a discussion on the outages.org mailing list confirmed the impact was affecting multiple carriers in Massachusetts including Windstream and CenturyLink plus MIT confirmed it knocked their OC11 data center offline affecting multiple services.

Any IT manager with data center experience understands that even the most well-designed facilities will eventually fail – even partially – and that’s why Total Uptime was created. We help organizations get around these issues with ease. So when planning your infrastructure, always consider redundancy and how you will route all of your traffic there.