Here in the east, summer didn’t decide to show up until August, and now the heat is here with a vengeance, which of course means severe weather of the electrical variety. Outside my office window a bolt of lightning slammed into the ground just a few moments ago.
(To protect the super secret location of our low profile facility, the arrow above is not actually pointed to our exact location 
). A mere 35 feet to to my left is 15,000sf of raised floor with customer production infrastructure humming along quietly. Am I worried about an outage? Not in the least. Why? Is it because we have a lightning suppression system deployed or because we have 3Mw of generator backup? Is it because we have paralleled UPS units and expensive battery strings? It is because we have at least one spare of every key component waiting in standby mode? None of the above. I’m not concerned because we TEST all this stuff, and we do so religiously.
Our generators are typically run weekly, and tested under full load regularly. Our switch gear is regularly maintained and tested by professionals. Do you trust your switch gear enough to pull the plug on the whole building? We do, and we test that too.
If you’re running infrastructure that you consider critical to your business, how comfortable are you that you’ll stay online if lightning takes out the utility pole across the street? Is your equipment protected from the electrical surges that summer storms bring? Really protected? If you’re using server-room class UPS units, such as the APC SmartUPS rack or free standing products, have you checked the health of those batteries lately? How about the load on those units? Has server sprawl quietly overloaded them? Will you stay up long enough to shut down gracefully or transfer to generator? If you’re not fortunate enough to have a generator, how long can you afford to wait for power to come back on?
Lots of obvious questions to be sure. But we find that in small to medium sized business, they are often tragically ignored or neglected. We know because these businesses in our area order their UPS units and parts from us, often after the worst has happened. When you discover that 92% of the businesses in the US are in fact 1-99 employees in size, neglected power infrastructure is a more widespread problem than you might imagine.
If you have a really big shop, it’s likely you have all of your power gear under maintenance and test it regularly just like we do, but if you’re a smaller shop, it would be good practice to begin regularly checking the health of your backup power gear and testing it. Today would not be too soon to start.
We care about all this because it’s par for the course if you’re running an enterprise-class data center as we do, but quite frankly it’s a pain in the butt if that’s not your business. If you’d rather focus on your core business and not worry about lightning storms, you could instead put your gear here. Outsource your power worries to folks who take them seriously and are well equipped to handle them.
//spk
