dannyman.toldme.com

It’s Getting Hot in Here!

Last Thursday I was picking up Yayoi when I got a page from one of my UPSes that it had switched to battery power. That’s never a page you want to get, unless there is shortly afterward a subsequent page about switching back to AC.

Well, the nice thing is that you can call PG&E and verify that an outage has occurred and check back with them every hour or so to see if things are back online. Then, if you are me, you may have to drive over to your office and spend some time getting some of the more interesting servers to get back on the wagon.

People tend to overestimate how long a UPS will keep you running through a blackout. Unless you have spent a lot of money, you tend to have enough juice to allow you fifteen or twenty minutes to log in to your machines and tell them to shut down gracefully. On the other hand, running out of battery is good for another reason: heat dissipation.

Oh, you weren’t going to put your 3-ton A/C unit on a UPS too, were you? That adds even more expense. If you need continuous power and AC, best to hire a datacenter, who can take responsibility for the needed diesel generators.