Consider An Emergency Generator

Should you supplement battery-based uninterruptible data center power supplies with an emergency generator? Vendors say the question has been coming up with increasing frequency as word spreads about summer rolling blackouts and brownouts and drops in service reliability. Two years ago, 50 million people in eight states from the Midwest to New York lost power for at least 24 hours in one giant blackout.

Amercan Power Conversion and other vendors note that specific localities can have much higher outage rates, either because of building-specific problems or bad weather (lightning strikes in the Southeast, for example, or tornadoes in the Midwest). In a rolling blackout, power to industrial facilities is often shut down first. New data center managers should check the utilities contract to see if the data center is subject to such utility disconnects.

A Growing Problem