Australia Faulty fan brings down Customs

I will be focusing on Australian IT outsourcing and Australian industry. Customs is a good example of what happens when an American company is the outsoucer, in this case it is EDS who look after the infrastructure and CA were contracted to produce the Integrated Cargo System.

It has taken me a bit of time to do research as to the terms and conditions for a contractor to via for a Federal government contract. For agrencies that are law enforcement agencies the contractor has to employ Australian citizens. So all the people employed by CA and EDS are Australians.

Imagine if an Indian company had done what is reported below, you can bet there would be headlines worldwide. Read on and have a laugh at these people. Further the ICS system was ment to cost $20 million but ended up costing $230 million, I will post more details.

Looks like ... the standby power supply was connected to the same circuit !!! Ummmm!

"However, is this case, these components were also impacted by the tripping of the power circuit, indicating there was a configuration problem with power cabling," the spokesman said.

Faulty fan brings down Customs James Riley FEBRUARY 02, 2006

A faulty fan designed to cool servers caused Customs' troubled Integrated Cargo System to crash last week, officials said.

But the Australian Customs Service still won't comment on why back-up systems failed to engage once the $230 million ICS was forced offline by the power problems.

The crash, which left the ICS offline for more than three hours on January 24, forced import-exporters to clear cargo manually using paper and fax machines.

"An investigation of the incident at the Sydney data centre confirmed that a faulty fan caused a power circuit to be tripped, preventing power from reaching servers that provide external access to the ICS," Customs acknowledged in a media statement.

A spokesman for the service said an investigation was still ongoing into problems with offsite back-up systems.

The ACS will not provide any detail on where the back-up systems are located, nor what specific problems the service might have had with them until the investigation is complete, the spokesman said.

The spokesman said the production system has redundant components - like cooling fans, uninterruptible power supplies, and processor boards - to mitigate the risk of an outage.

"However, is this case, these components were also impacted by the tripping of the power circuit, indicating there was a configuration problem with power cabling," the spokesman said.

As a result, he said a complete review of the power configuration for the ICS had been undertaken at the data centre to make sure the systems redundant components were not affected in future.

The ACS has flatly denied reports that it is blaming outsourcing partner EDS for the outage.

EDS houses the ICS computer systems at one of its Sydney data centres, but Customs owns the hardware and software.

"We're not pointing the finger at anyone. We are simply not at that stage yet," the Customs spokesman said.

The Australian