Computer Outages Hobble Services in Virginia

August 27th, 2010 -Many critical services in the state of Virginia were crippled Thursday by computer failures in a state data center in Chesterfield, state officials said. More than 220 servers were offline, leaving at least 24 state agencies without full IT support, according to local media.

The outages disrupted the state’s ability to process child support payments and aid to needy families, or accept new claims for unemployment benefits or applications for driver’s licenses, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

“We’re disappointed to have a failure, an outage of this magnitude,” Samuel Nixon Jr., head of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, told the paper. “No matter what you do, it’s going to happen on occasion.”

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.