Data Center Power

Much of New York City Powered by Back-Up Post-Sandy

By Michelle Amodio TMCnet Contributor

Despite the fact that it has been two weeks since Hurrican Sandy hit the east coast, much of New York City’s facilities and data centers are still relying on back-up power to keep systems going. As utility companies fall under official scrutiny for improper preparedness, the responsibility of keeping things seamless has fallen to IT professionals and data center managers for uninterruptible functionality.

Specifically, the facilities of Internap (News - Alert), Equinix, Datagram and Telehouse all reported issues and outages and are still experiencing much of the same in the areas affected, which for Equinix (News - Alert) is five sites within New York and New Jersey, the two states who were hit hardest by the storm.

For Internap, the battery backup became exhausted as their infrastructure lost power.

“This incident caused a loss of IP connectivity for several service points until power to our P-NAP was restored. At this point, we have connectivity restored for all customers and power restored to the majority of our data center customers. We continue to work with vendors to bring the entire site back online,” said Steve Orchard, senior VP of development at Internap, in a company blog post.

The company’s location at 75 Broad Street was evacuated, as its location was right in the path of the storm. The flooding that ensued destroyed their diesel pumps, so no fuel was able to make it to their generators.

Datagram, an Internet service provider, suffered the worst damage caused by flood, which resulted in popular sites such as Huffington Post (News - Alert) and Gawker to lose service, thus resulting in outages.

When it comes to natural disasters and disaster preparedness, first item of concern is, of course safety. In a tech era where we are always connected, and in an era where connectivity means not losing business, power protection is something that can be executed safely and should be on the checklist of items for data center power managers.

The biggest lesson to learn from Hurricane Sandy? Remote power management.

When it comes to data center power, having the ability to enlist remote power management which, according to the data center power blog, which essentially will allow all hardware systems to take care of itself so that the people – the most important asset – can safely evacuate, away from a storm’s path, and get to safety.

According to the blog, remote power management can “assist you with Smart Load Shedding-managed hardware shutdown that can automatically pare back the operating hardware to the bare minimum or even turn everything off.”

So, on your disaster preparedness checklist, in addition to generator fuel, remote backup and charged batteries, shouldn’t remote power management be on the list?

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