In an ever-increasingly technology dependent world, data centers are big business. Companies and organizations around the world — and not just Internet-based companies — count on reliable data centers to keep business operations up and running. What happened on Tuesday, July 24 in San Francisco is a good example of what shouldn’t happen if power to a data center is cut off. When power to a large data center was lost from the utility company, the backup generators failed to start immediately, and were only turned on a full 45 minutes after the blackout started. This led to a number of large Internet sites to crash; some for a few hours, but some for much longer as they had to reboot servers. The company running the data center is still investigating why the generators didn’t immediately kick in. What I wonder is why it took almost an hour to get them on at all. Obviously, something wasn’t quite right in that facility — or there were some grave communication errors. Only time will tell if there can be a lesson learned from the situation…and if the data center facility will still be in business much longer. The irony of the whole fiasco? It happened just hours after the data center sent out a press release trumpeting one company’s action of moving sole operations to the facility and closing an uneeded one in the Midwest.
A reminder: Building Operating Management’s Critical Facilities section highlights issues and concerns specific to data centers. Watch for an article on UPS systems in the August issue.