Severe Damage To Some Servers at The Planet

The vast majority of The Planet's customers are back online after the explosion and fire that crippled the company's primary data center in Houston on May 31. But a number of customer servers were badly damaged and have been shipped to a data recovery specialist.

"For some, there has been severe damage to their hard drives as a result of the power loss in the H1 data center," The Planet said in an update Friday afternoon. "To assist customers whose drives have been affected, we have arranged to ship the devices to Data Recovery Systems (DRS), a leading provider of hard-drive recovery services. DRS will attempt to recover the data. Once this has been done, we will reinstall the drive."

In the early hours after the explosion, The Planet issued several updates saying no servers had been damaged. But after the first floor of the data center was brought back online, many servers failed to start properly. While some merely required reboots, others needed more significant repairs. The Planet said it ordered more than 200 power supplies and other hardware components to replace failed equipment.

The notice about server damage followed a second generator failure Friday morning, which was remedied quickly because The Planet obtained additional backup units after a generator failure on June 2 set back efforts to restore power to the first floor of the Houston data center.

The Planet will absorb the cost of the data recovery efforts to the damaged customer hard drives. In addition to the direct costs of the damage to the electrical room and replacement of all conduits, The Planet has also issued a service credit for June to all customers who were affected.

Here's a recap of our coverage of the incident at The Planet: