Tuesday's Power Outage > the backup has to be switched on?!

the backup has to be switched on?!

It should. But it is all about testing. I can unplug UPS to test it, but it does not seem like a great idea to turn off electricity in big building and turn on generators to just try how it works. Also it may work first time, but you need to do it each week to make sure it works all the time. This is problem with high availability, it works best when nothing happens.

Also weekly "tests" of the generator usually don't drop a load on the genset, and also doesn't test the load transfer aspects of the system. Just running it for 10-20 minutes and shutting it down is usually all that happens in a weekly "test:.

My company brings in a load bank (tractor trailer) onces per quarter and run @ 100% load for 4 hours. Even that doesn't test the transfer parts of the system...and if street power drops during the test we have 20 minuts to remove the loadbank before batteries die.

reply to kba4
Are you saying that your $50 UPS is wired into your house wiring with an automatic transfer switch, and a generator that detects loss of street power and starts automatically is connected to that as well?

Because, that's the only way your $50 UPS would be comparable.

reply to kba4
my cheapo UPS can automatically sense an outage, with/without a connected PC, and transfer to a 5-10min battery for safe shutdown of connected equipment. it seems to me that it's only logical that this technology would be built into what must be at least a multi-thousand dollar system at a data center. I don't think anyone here should be making excuses for these failures, let the companies involved apologize.

at the very least, shouldn't there be a dedicated monitoring room for this stuff? considering that the data center probably profits at least a little, they could afford to pay people to watch for problems, with overlapping shifts, and flip the switch...
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reply to decadent
The ISP I worked at cut commercial power once a week (Sunday, like at 4am) to test their equipment.

It's like saying that you don't want to test your smoke alarms because pushing the button is not like a real fire.

reply to smcallah
I work in a hospital and have personally been here during power outages (including the "Great Northeast Blackout" in 2003). In every case, the lights turned off (as they aren't on the generator), but the servers kept running smoothly. The generators kicked on within milliseconds (I'm guessing since I can't time that quickly) of the power loss and kept the servers running fine.

Now, if a medium-sized health care organization/hospital can do this, why not a large data center? Especially one that just that day touted it's backup power generators. If anything, they should be able to outlast us during a long power outage.

reply to quetwo
Agreed! Kudos to your ISP for at least doing proper testing, 365Main after this looks like a joke, well compared to my work IT IS (Canadian Navy).

IF you know anyone who deals with 365Main they ought to move their stuff elsewhere.