power outage question
 

How do you guys normally handle the power outage. Our datacenter has ups as backup, but we need to manually kicked in when power goes down. Is it the regular design?

In my experience it would be strange to have a UPS on a manual switch, since this would defeat its main purpose: to prevent a server outage. On the other hand, sometimes generators must be started or switched into service manually, before the UPS batteries run out. Is this your situation?


Ken

Most design are automatic transfer of power to generator - What you want to validate is that the UPS service can support full power until generator is at speed to support the transfer. I have run into a couple of situation that put data centers on old Generator and the timing and load do not meet the requirements of the data center.

That seems quite a strange setup Tom - I would expect all critical computer equipment to be on the good side of the UPS. Generally I have it laid out like this. If you do have a problem with your UPS, you want to be able to bypass it, likewise, you want to be able to bypass your ATS if the very worst should happen.

Apologies for my terrible ASCII art :)

Thanks a lot for all the information. Do we need to have backup to backup UPS system? If we are running very critical application like, trading floor application?

In this situation, run everything with A+B feeds from multiple UPS's, fed from differenet generators if it is mission critical.

Oh, and perform regular testing to make sure that everything fails over correctly - obviously in a nice scheduled window out side of trading hours :)

Schumie,

Thank you for the info. Most of the servers are cluster and we are keeping it in same datacenter. Would recommend to keep them in different datacenter? Thanks in advance.

Easy one to figure out:

What is the cost of designing your system to work over multiple data centres VS what is your lost profit should your systems not be available.

Customer is willing to spend more money, but my questions is that is it reliable to have cluster box in different datacenter? Can we easily mange hearbeat signal?

The UPS seems like a must but what to do when a long power outage occurs. I think that the only solution would be to get a large backup generator which would kick in before the UPS dies.