Achieving zero outages is hard enough at the best of times, and when power supplies are unreliable it's almost impossible. But that's what colleagues from the EDS data centre in Senderwood, South Africa managed to do during a recent 71-hour power cut.
Since EDS occupied the facility in 1995, the centre has maintained an outstanding record of zero outages. In fact, in the past three years, Senderwood has only had one sev 1 incident. This record and the data centre's excellent design; especially around redundancy and rigorous maintenance of the facilities, put the team in good stead for the challenge they faced when power in their area was lost.
The blackout affected multiple cities across an area of over 80 square kms and the South African government has estimated the economic loss to the region could be in the region of multiple millions of Rands.
Being a best shore location, supporting IT infrastructure for many clients including Dulux, South African Airways, Afrox, Life health Care, Nissan as well as EDS' international BP call centre environment, it was vital our operations kept running.
"The accounts we support from this data centre include some of EDS' most important global clients," said Eugene Pretorius, Hub leader for the region. "There was never any question that we needed to remain fully operational and everyone did what was necessary to make this a reality."
Throughout the whole incident, our data centre remained fully functional, as many factories, offices and one of the largest retail malls in the southern hemisphere were all forced to close their doors within a day of the power outage.
"Delivering a reliable service for our clients is essential if we are to remain competitive," said Peter Hands, UKIMEA Hub leader. "Clients don't want to hear what problems we're encountering, they just want to know that when the pressure is on, we can still offer the standard of service they are used to. The service level our Senderwood team is providing is exceptional and we should be looking to replicate this world-wide."
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