A fire has broken out at Glenside Data Centre in Adelaide, Australia.
The incident caused the electronic medical records system of South Australia’s state hospitals, among other government services, to fail.
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The Glenside facility is the state government's primary data center. The electrical fire first started at 9:45am local time but was put out before fire services arrived. According to Adelaide Now, by 5pm local time the systems were still offline.
According to the executive director and government chief information officer at the Government of South Australia, Dr. Eva Balan-Vnuk, the data center's “cooling system was impacted by an electrical incident.” Balan-Vnuk said that power is expected to be returned to the cooling system overnight.
The exact cause of the ‘electrical incident’ has not yet been discovered.
Digital Health SA advised hospital employees that the fire is “causing major issues to services and applications for SA Health including Sunrise EMR & PAS.”
The outage is affecting the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Lyell McEwin Hospital, and Modbury Hospital, meaning that doctors' notes and medical records cannot be accessed.
An SA Health spokesperson said the fire “has created issues with some systems and connectivity across the network, including with electronic medical records system.”
“SA Health is in the process of moving systems and applications over to a data center at another location. We will restore all impacted systems as quickly as possible.”
Which data center these applications will be moved to has not been shared.
As well as the health records, some South Australian Government ICT services have been impacted, though according to Balan-Vnuk, “no significant adverse outcomes have been identified however some systems may be operating slower than usual.”
Adelaide is home to data centers owned by DCI, including ADL01, with the company currently working on ADL02 and ADL03. The South Australian Government hosts some IT equipment in ADL01 already.
In addition to DCI, NextDC, and CDC are also in the process of setting up new facilities in the Australian state’s capital.
