A fire in a data center in Almere has shut down several systems at companies and institutions in the Netherlands, including Utrecht University, from Thursday afternoon. There was a “major impact” on daily work, research and education, the university reported.
In the night from Thursday to Friday, the fire brigade in Almere declared the fire under control, after a NL alert was issued to the local population on Thursday due to smoke development.
Four questions about the fire and its consequences.
1Where did the fire rage?
The fire raged in the building where generators are located that ensure that the data center remains operational in the event of a power outage. To make it possible to extinguish the fire, the electricity for the entire data center was disconnected by order of the fire brigade, causing the functions to fail on Thursday morning.
According to NorthC, owner of this data center and thirteen others in the Netherlands, there is only smoke damage in the adjacent areas, where servers and data carriers are located. Director Alexandra Schless says that inspection by a specialized team has not shown any significant damage to this equipment “as yet”. The company said in a statement on Friday afternoon that it expects “to be able to make power and cooling available to customers in phases within 72 hours.”
A major customer of NorthC is Uniserver, a party that ensures that IT facilities are operational on behalf of customers (Utrecht University is not one of them). Jeroen Wouda of Uniserver confirms that equipment has not suffered any damage. “The building is compartmentalized in such a way that one room can burn out completely without damage to the equipment in another room. In our case, it concerns backup capacity in this data center, so our customers did not notice anything.”
2How did the fire start?
Nothing is yet known about the circumstances, says Schless. According to the police, intent does not appear to be involved, “but that is speculation at the moment,” said a spokesperson. The on-site investigation could only begin on Friday afternoon, because the building was too dangerous to enter for a long time. This previously made it difficult to fight the fire: the fire brigade could only extinguish it from outside.
The emergency generators are tested regularly, says Schless, but this was not the case on Thursday morning. Employees were present in the data center when the fire alarm went off. “We will of course investigate this in depth.”
3Why did Utrecht University not have a backup or fallback option?
A spokesperson for Utrecht University says that a university’s IT landscape is “large and complex”, and it “takes time to get backups and fallback systems operational in a robust and stable manner.”
The trade-off between the risk of such an exceptional situation on the one hand and the costs of having facilities immediately ready on the other hand “always” plays a role, the spokesperson said. “We do have a series of backup measures, but implementing them is complex and takes time. Our people work hard, but they cannot go faster than they can.”
On Friday, the advice was not to log in to UU systems. “This also applies to Microsoft systems such as Outlook, Teams, Word, etc., even if they work,” read the warning on the university site.
4What are the further consequences?
The university expects to be able to provide more clarity about physical access to campus locations next week at 12 noon on Sunday. But even if the university can partially open on Monday, not all systems will be fully available again immediately.
Several other parties whose systems are housed in the Almere data center were inconvenienced by the fire on Friday. Various IT systems at the Central Bureau of Statistics have not been easily accessible. The press number could not be reached on Friday afternoon and no response was received to an email. Demographer Ruben van Gaalen, CBS employee, calls it “annoying”, but also states that nothing has been lost. “The problems are mainly in the interface”, or the access to data and connection of systems.
Shipping company Doeksen in Harlingen, where ferry services to Vlieland and Terschelling dock and unmoor, had problems with access gates that will last all weekend, director Dirk Spoor told the newspaper. Leeuwarder Courant. According to RTV Utrecht, city bus transport in Utrecht, provided by Transdev since December, also had problems with communication systems used by drivers, according to RTV Utrecht.
