

Data Centers With No UPS or Generator? - 1SockChuck
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/07/14/data-centers-with-no-ups-or-generator/

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ars
I don't use a UPS for a power outage - I use it for a power "blink". Where the
power turns off for second or so.

Yahoo will need the same, unless they know the grid where the are never does
switchovers, and never gets hit by lighting.

Maybe they don't need a generator, but a UPS is essential.

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hugh3
How often does that happen?

What's the worst-case scenario if it does? Some people don't get served their
web pages and have to hit reload?

I'm more concerned about Blue Waters. Power outages might not happen very
often at Urbana-Champaign, but each one will annoy hundreds of scientists.

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ars
> How often does that happen?

During the stormy season lightning strikes happen every few days, although not
all of them cause a blink that lasts long enough to reboot the computer.

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jsz0
Too scary for me. Who decides what is essential and non-essential? Is it worth
risking thousands or millions of dollars worth of equipment sitting on the
commercial power grid without conditioning? In case of natural disasters you
have to accept the reality you could be without commercial power for a long
period of time. Might work for Yahoo's architecture but I'd be more
comfortable with a more traditional approach myself. If you have a somewhat
power efficient data center a small UPS/generator is pretty cheap. I'm
guessing they're doing this more for environmental concerns than cost.

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maukdaddy
You can have power conditioning without a UPS per se.

Most businesses, and I'm saying this as a former consultant, greatly
overestimate what systems are truly critical. Each group within a large
company wants to claim their systems are the most critical to the business,
but in reality, very few systems need to be up 24x7.

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AlekseyKorzun
From my personal experience; the actual question should be:

'Datacenters with UPS and generator that were never tested and never seem to
work when power goes off?'

