June 2007 Archive

New Public Site Launched

We spent the last few months redesigning our site to make our products and services easier to find and understand. Our new site provides two entry points for visitors, guiding them through the process of learning more, or taking them directly to a specific product of interest.

Please visit our new website at www.maximumasp.com today to learn how our services and new offerings can help you grow your business. Our website will continue to develop over time, incorporating your feedback and suggestions. It is our intention to provide our customers with the most valuable information and resource tools available. Please send feedback regarding the website to marketing@maximumasp.com

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Bad Things Can Happen…Twice

So why would I be taking time to write a post about us having redundancy and it actually working right? Well, it's pretty simple really. In the hosting business, there have been several incidents over the years where all of the promised redundancies did not work as they should and customers were left offline for extended periods. Times where transformers blew up and there was no backup power source, generators sat with their diesel engines locked up due to no one test firing them on a regular schedule, or UPS systems that were overloaded and failed as other back up systems attempted to come online. Last week, it was very satisfying to watch all of the systems we tout here at MaximumASP work exactly as designed, and you the customer experienced absolutely no downtime.

On Thursday, June 14th, at approximately 12:15PM EST the utility supplier to Louisville, Kentucky experienced a significant transformer failure in a substation that is in the same grid as the MaximumASP data center. This failure forced other parts of the grid to attempt to carry the load of failed section. This was too much for the remaining sections to handle and they began to cascade into a blackout condition. As this reached the MaximumASP data center, the UPS systems carried the full data center load as the power bucked 3 times in a 10 second span. As the UPS carried the load, the Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) sensed the supply change and fired up the 2 megawatt generator. As the generator synchronized cycles with the existing electrical load, the ATS shifted power to the generator. We remained in this state for almost 1 full hour, until power was restored from the utility.

Less than 1 hour after power was restored by the utility, the transformer failed again. Like clockwork, the UPS's, ATS and generator engaged, and we switched the generator to manual mode allowing us to run it continuously until we were confident that the problem had been completely rectified. We actually ran the unit until 6PM EST that evening making our own power, and allowing the diesel refueling trucks to come in and replenish the fuel tanks as the generator was running.

All is normalized now, but I thought that some of you might be interested in all that went on behind the scenes on Thursday as your servers, switches, SANS, and disk arrays hummed along without skipping a beat. It is certainly nice to see these complex support systems work as they were designed to, and hopefully this provides further reassurance that you made the right choice in selecting MaximumASP as your hosting provider.

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New Look

Pardon our dust as we roll out a new look for the weblog and our public site

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