California Power Emergency: Protecting Your Data Center
Because Data Centers rely on a continuous uninterrupted electrical power supply to function, the current heat emergency in California presents a significant risk for Data Center owners and managers. With temperatures in some parts of the state expected to reach, and stay at, triple digits in late August, and cities all across the Western US under high heat alerts, the grid is unable to handle the power demand.
Many across the state are experiencing power outages as the grid fails and power utility companies institute rolling outages. Each of these outages threatens Data Centers in that area—power is a single point of failure. If it unexpectedly becomes unavailable, Data Centers have to be able to rely on backup power systems to maintain mission-critical uptime.
In dealing with this extreme heat, all Data Centers throughout California and the Western US need to ensure their facilities are ready to deal with outages like these. This also serves as a reminder for those outside the heatwave zone of the critical importance of understanding your own Data Center’s power—access from the utility, the size of the Data Center load being supported, how much power is needed to maintain that load as well as the status of on-site UPS systems and generators.
With thousands of Data Centers located in California alone, from colocation centers to enterprise Data Centers to Edge facilities, the heatwave is putting billions of dollars of business activity at risk. There are many steps to ensure your Data Center maintains power and to protect your investment and your business. The most important, especially right now in the midst of this heat emergency, is redundancy.
For some, redundancy means an N+1 system, with a backup generator to run the Data Center when power from the grid fails. For others, it’s 2N redundancy, a full and complete mirror of the Data Center – servers, IT equipment, and power and cooling infrastructure – that can act as a backup. Whatever level of redundancy you have, right now it is critical to ensure your system has that redundancy and is ready for action.
With DSI’s Power Readiness Services, we can assess your entire system and give you a clear picture of your Data Center’s existing backup power system and especially identify gaps. We can then provide you with recommendations on how to ensure your Data Center is able to deal with this and other power emergencies. Also, DSI offers implementation of updated power and backup supply services for Data Centers of all sizes to ensure they are ready to deal with this heat emergency.
Given the threats to continuous operations of the power grid due to these summer heatwaves, California and Western US Data Centers are at increased risk of losing power. Which would cause downtime that damage your business and reputation and prevent you from meeting your company’s and customers’ business goals.
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