San Francisco Power Outage

Wed Jul 25 10:21:59 UTC 2007

> And the stories that the power guy I'm working with tells 
> about foreign facilities, particularly in middle east war 
> zones, are really scary...

> We fundamentally do not have the facilities problem 
> completely nailed down to the point that things will never 
> drop.  Level 4
> datacenters can, and will, fail.   Nothing you can do including
> just doing 48V DC for everything are truly foolproof solutions.

A single level 4 datacenter is a Single Point of Failure!

Two of those middle-eastern style facilities is... ?
Has anyone actually kept track of all these data center failures over
the years and done some statistical analysis on it? Maybe two half-baked
data centers is better than one over the long run?

Remember that one 10-12 years ago in (Palo Alto, Mountainview?) where a
lady in a car caused a backhoe driver to move out of the way which
resulted in him cutting a gas line which resulted in the fire department
evacuating the data center, cutting off electricity in the area, and
forbidding the diesel generators to be switched on? 

--Michael Dillon