ServePath Blog

ServePath’s San Francisco data center maintained its 100% facility uptime record during a transformer explosion that darkened the building and affected other adjacent data center facilities. No ServePath dedicated servers were affected by the incident.

On Tuesday afternoon at approximately 4 PM, there was an explosion of an underground utility transformer at the south west corner of Spear and Harrison streets in San Francisco. A loud pop was heard, and all the CRT screens in ServePath’s office space across the street were affected by a powerful electromagnetic surge. The cement sidewalk cover over the transformer was even shattered due to the force of the explosion pushing upward.

Power was lost to the ServePath building at 360 Spear Street, including hallway lighting and the JMA Wired colocation facility on the first floor, but ServePath’s facility was unaffected. This is because ServePath’s facility shares dual power grids and backup generators with MCI, and is powered by two private feeds using separate trenches from the utility.

Utility crews were on site within minutes, and power was restored to the building roughly an hour later. The outage at the JMA Wired facility was traced to a problem with the automatic transfer switch, which failed to engage to switch from utility to generator power after the explosion, but was resolved in about 30 minutes.

ServePath’s dedicated server customers were unaffected by the explosion, with no power interruptions or spikes, and maintained 100% uptime during the unusual incident.

This week ColoServe began the installation of two new Liebert 30-ton Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC) units in our San Francisco colocation facility, bringing our total installed cooling capacity to 150 tons. ColoServe’s San Francisco data center was built by MCI with dual redundant chilled water loops and connection points for over 30 CRAC units, but prior to the upgrade three units had been installed.

Getting the new units into our second floor data center turned out to be an interesting challenge, with each 8′ x 6′ x 3′ air conditioner weighing in at 2300 pounds. The original units were brought in by crane when the building was being retrofit, so at that time the windows and 24 inch-thick concrete sheer wall than spans much of the building had not yet been installed.

By working with an elevator maintenance company to remove the back wall of one of the building’s freight elevators, the ColoServe data center team managed to get the units to fit in the elevator for transport into place on the data center floor.

The units are currently being attached to the chilled water supply loop, and we are looking forward to increased cooling capacity as well as an increased level of redundancy in ColoServe’s colocation facility.