Samsung data centre fire and Easter outage raises reliability concerns

A fire at a Samsung data centre managed to knock out access to apps and services for six hours over the long weekend, raising concerns about the company’s data centre failover policies.

According to a report in the Korea JoongAng Daily, an electrical generator is believed to have sparked a fire in the backup datacentre of Samsung SDS, the IT and cloud services affiliate company of the Samsung Group.

Aside from one contractor hit by debris, there were no casualties reported from the facility in Gwacheon, south of Seoul.

However, the blaze led to a six hour blackout for Samsung websites, as well as the company’s SmartHub and smartphone services.

In a statement in Korean, but not appearing on its English language site, Samsung apologised to customers over the blaze.

“A fire occurred Samsung SDS ICT centre in Gwacheon area. To customers and residents, we apologise for any inconvenience.

“Samsung SDS will confirm the cause of the fire and survey the scale of the damage. Relevant authorities [are] to cooperate actively in the planning.”

However, the incident has raised concerns for some resellers of Samsung cloud services.

The chief executive of Samsung solution provider 2k Networks told CRN the incident was worrying.

“I was pleased to see that service came back online quickly. It appears they did have a plan in place to recover and get back online. There was a service interruption that was minimal. However, there was not an automatic fail-over to another site.”