November 15, 2006

Bad Electricity Day

Today at work, our power was out for 4.5 hours.

This is bad since I work in computers.

For the first 2.5 hours, all the servers were on battery power, but once that ran out, we were dead in the water. We did shut down non-essential systems as soon as the power went out so that we could save the valuable battery power, and in the end we were down to like the 6 most essential ones, but the outage outlasted the batteries.

Now, these aren't normal UPS batteries like you might see in someone's home office. Oh no! This thing is the size of a small SUV and runs about 60 servers and a dozen monitors for the two and a half hour period. That's some serious power.

But, it didn't last. We ended up bringing in 3 small generators to try and power up our phone system (which is VOIP, so we needed our network switches) at least. We got that working and about 15 minutes later the power came back on. Doh! But we've decided that we need to purchase out own generator so that we have it ready on a moment's notice.

Here are some pictures:

[Just pretend. I haven't put them up yet]

No comments: