Power equipment fault cuts Kakao services at LG CNS data centre

What happened

On 28 April 2012 a fault in power equipment at LG CNS's Gasan data centre in South Korea cut the power supply to the dedicated space leased by Kakao. KakaoTalk, KakaoStory and other Kakao services were unavailable for about four hours. Kakao had leased a dedicated area in the facility, and the loss of power affected the servers in that area. LG CNS was criticised over how power was operated at the data centre, and Kakao was criticised for not distributing its servers across several sites.

Kakao management said it would consider running servers at several locations in a dual system over the medium to long term. A Blockmedia article published in October 2022, citing a Newsis report, recalled the 2012 event after a fire at SK C&C's Pangyo data centre caused another service stoppage through a cut in power supply.

Contributing factors

The source reports criticism of LG CNS's power operation at the data centre and of Kakao's reliance on a single site rather than distributed servers. The specific nature of the power equipment fault is not described.

Lessons learned

1. A fault in one power system can cut supply to an entire leased server area, so tenants should understand which power chains serve their equipment.
2. Services that cannot tolerate a site outage should run across several sites in a dual or distributed arrangement, with failover tested regularly.
3. Data centre operators should isolate power faults so that a fault in one section does not shut down whole server rooms, and should keep backup and recovery procedures current.

More lessons on outages, backup supply and restoration, worker safety and safe systems of work, from every incident on the register.

Source

blockmedia.co.kr