It's All About Power

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Disaster Recovery Planning

It's All About Power

5/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

Emergency Power 101

If your emergency power plan doesn't include these three components, go to the back of the class.

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) kicks into action the moment electrical power from a utility stops flowing. In a well-outfitted data center, the idea is to have battery backup sufficient to keep all critical equipment running until the power generator turns on, warms up, stabilizes its flow of electricity, and takes over.
A power generator, fueled by natural gas, diesel, or some other source, provides a flow of power for long-term outages, whether 15 minutes or 15 hours-whatever exceeds the capabilities of the UPS units. (A source of fuel storage is needed for diesel, but there's less concern about spontaneous fuel combustion, there are ample suppliers, and there's a reputation for lower maintenance and longer life. With natural gas, there's no need for a fuel tank, and some people believe it's "cleaner," but if there's an earthquake or similar disaster to disrupt the gas lines, the campus would have no fuel supply. Still, few agree about which approach is more affordable.) The best models, say the pros, automatically sense when utility power is unavailable, and begin their warm-up process. Once a UPS detects that a stable source of power is coming in from a generator, it shuts down the energy coming from batteries in favor of power supply coming from a generator.
Air conditioning is the oft-forgotten aspect of emergency power.Without proper cooling, equipment in a data center will eventually fail due to overheating. Any emergency power scheme has to ensure that AC units and other forms of coolers are hooked into the fallback generator system so that cooling doesn't go down in the event of an outage.

Other campus locations Zeller is monitoring have varying degrees of backup. The site where the campus telephone switch is located, for instance, has UPS and generator coverage. But the site where the tape robot system resides lacks a generator. "We’d like to have one, but it’s not as critical," says the operations manager. If the power goes out, "we may lose a day on our backup. That’s a level that people are willing to accept, based upon the cost to install."