While such outages may be brief or affect smaller populations, their impacts can still be significant. As in California, extreme heat drove utility customers to turn up their air conditioners, taking down utility supplies in 20 of the country’s 28 states.Īnd less catastrophic failures also occur regularly, caused by increasingly severe storms or ageing electrical infrastructure. And only a month earlier, more than 700 million people in India were left in the dark as three of the country’s five grid systems failed, due to demand surpassing capacity. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were affected. In August 2020, the California Independent System Operator overseeing the state’s electricity grid imposed rolling blackouts as heat-related demand came close to surpassing supply. You don’t have to look very far back in the headlines to find examples of outages from severe weather – and human error – cutting power to large populations. What’s more, it will kick in instantly as soon as power is disrupted – even during a minor flicker – so data is protected and connected equipment doesn’t suffer any damage that power fluctuations can cause. When not in use, the battery is constantly recharged, so it will be ready to go when called upon. They incorporate a battery that can power electronics and appliances during an outage or brownout. UPSs provide both backup power protection and surge protection. An uninterruptible power supply can keep businesses up and running, even when the power goes down. To proactively deal with this power uncertainty, electricians can play an important role by offering their customers a practical solution. Such power disruptions threaten the digital connections many small businesses have come to depend on. Not to mention, many people regularly deal with frequent brownouts caused by an overburdened or ageing power grid. A sudden blackout can shut down critical equipment, impact smart home applications, and bring the point-of-sale system at businesses to a halt. Severe storms, heat waves, and floods are regularly threatening utility-supplied power. We have to shut everything down once every 5 years, for several days of maintenance, but it was deemed to be an acceptable trade-off for a research data center.Stewart Gregory, VP Power Products at Schneider Electric UK&I, highlights the importance of backup power, and why it’s a critical solution for electricians to offer.īusiness owners are more concerned than ever about the reliability of their electricity supply. Each rack only has one PDU, and row only has one set of busbars, and traces back to only one UPS. And our data center is single-fed: We have two sets of cables coming in to the building, but we are getting power from just one substation.
Data backup kicks in during outage plus#
Our PDUs run at 240 VAC line-to-neutral (415 VAC line-to-line), which means we only need a single set of transformers (prior to the UPS), plus a small 120/240 transformer for office spaces. We do fresh-air cooling whenever possible, which saves on power costs.
We use flywheel UPSes, so there are no batteries to replace. And of course the outage would happen when there’s a critical grant deadline.Īll that being said, there are still ways you can save money. It can be hard telling users that they’ve lost a day of compute because we decided to save $X in capital costs. We don’t have to deal with a transient power issue knocking out all of the compute nodes, not only from the sudden workload of having to bring everything back up, but also from the impact to our reputation. We don’t have to take the risk that someone plugged a storage controller into the non-UPS rack. That’s intentional, though if you are building a data center around a cluster, and aren’t going to use it for anything else, then of course things will be different.īut it’s also nice having the peace-of-mind. A fair amount of space is used for data storage, and alot of our space is used for things that aren’t clusters. That being said, our data center has more than just our HPC clusters. Personally, I’d suggest against segregating your data center in such a way. We have our entire data center protected by double-conversion flywheel UPSes, just long enough to keep things up before backup generators can kick on in the event of a power outage.
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