Power Loss

Online Technologies Corporation stayed fully operational during the Midwest blackout of 2003. There are many other failure points between the power plant and your servers.

OTC's power infrastructure is designed for High availability hosting and Disaster Recovery .

For more information on power loss and power infrastructures for your servers contact OTC at 734-213-2020, or email sales@onlinetech.net

• Power Loss

  • Weather - Hurricanes, Ice storms and Tornados have taken their toll on power infrastructure

    
    

  • Distribution failure - During the blackout of 2003, there was a failure in the management of the distribution of power. This caused wide regional outages.

    
    

  • Overload of power system - During very hot summer days, the public power infrastructure is often overloaded causing brown outs and even sometimes black-outs. This trend is predicted to continue as the use of AC and other electrical devices grows

    
    

• Data Center Power Infrastructure

  • At least one main power feed and the generator connect to a transfer switch

    
    

  • The transfer switch then goes through power distribution equipment such as transformers to modify and distribute the power

    
    

  • The transformers are connected to the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) which cleans the power and offers immediate battery backup for tens of minutes, not hours

    
    

  • The servers are plugged into circuits that are wired into the UPS either directly or through Power Distribution Units (PDUs)

    
    

  • Sizing, building and managing power infrastructure’s is complex. An example:

    • Say each of your 40 servers draw 200 watts of power at 120 Volts

      
      

    • Assume 0% safety factor and no redundancy

      
      

    • This would require 8.0kva of UPS, 2.3 tons of cooling and 8 kilowatts (8 KW) of generator power.

      
      

• What Happens During a Power Outage

  • The UPS senses a power failure and instantly provides power to the servers from the batteries, faster than the servers notice  

    
    

  • The Transfer switch starts the generator and gives it a few minutes to warm up

    
    

  • Once the generator is running properly (about 30 seconds after initial power loss), the transfer switch switches from feed from the power company to the generator

    
    

  • The UPS sees that power is now available (it gets it’s power from the transfer switch) and stops providing power from the batteries

    
    

  • The servers are now running on the generator. The generator is also recharging the batteries in the UPS

    
    

• What does OTC do for a Power Infrastructure?

  • OTC uses generators, transforms, Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and power distribution units (PDUs) at all data centers

    
    

  • Total infrastructure can support over 8,000 of the servers used in the example above (200 watts, 120 volts)

    
    

  • OTC-Flint boasts dual 2,000 kva 8,000 volt utility feeds; 3 pooled UPS each of 562.5 KVA; 2 pooled 1.3 megawatt diesel generators

    
    

  • For more deails about OTC's Power Infrastructurre see Data Centers