25 ms·

As someone that used to help manage data-centers I think this is fine. I had to load test the generators quarterly. It's good to ensure the transfer switches

by Bender 1y ago

As someone that used to help manage data-centers I think this is fine. I had to load test the generators quarterly. It's good to ensure the transfer switches and generators are working and nothing beats a real world load test. The data-centers have contracts with diesel fuel providers to keep the main tanks full. They can run on diesel any time the infrastructure load is high and write off the cost in their taxes check with your tax lawyer. There may even be other tax advantages being the need for generators would be compelled by the state, perhaps a tax lawyer could find ways to make a generator tech refresh get a bigger write-down, write off better noise abatement walls as usage will increase. If a company was running with scissors and did not buy enough generator capacity to run everything then they will have to get their act together now vs. later.

Shank 1y ago
This is true, but how long will firm load shed events last, and how many of them will happen? In California, when CAISO has events that lead to firm load shedding, they're predictable, rolling blackouts and everyone knows how long they'll last, and they're assigned on a customer-specific basis. You know your power will be cut, and you know it will be a certain amount of time, and you know roughly where you are in the schedule. I could see operators of datacenters in Texas wondering about this. Also, it's underrated how much critical infrastructure is dependent on datacenters running. Like, are you going to pull someone's EHR system down that serves a local hospital, while keeping the local hospital on a critical circuit?
- Bender 1y ago
  You know your power will be cut, and you know it will be a certain amount of time, and you know roughly where you are in the schedule. Knowing when the power will be cut will not help unless I am misunderstanding you. If the data-center loses power for even a minute the generators will all fire up and then every ATS will count-down and transfer in 30 seconds. Battery backup only lasts just long enough to do a quick return to service on a failed generator and even that is sketchy at best. A properly engineered data-center can run on reduced generator capacity. Some data-centers are indeed on circuits deemed to be critical but I could see regulations changing this so that they are "business critical" vs. "life support critical" and some changes could be made at substations so that data-centers could participate in shedding. I think you are right that they will be thinking about this and adding to this probably filing preemptive lawsuits to protect their business. Such changes can violate SLA contracts businesses have with power companies and Texas is very pro-business so I can not compare it to California.
  - toast0 1y ago
    > Knowing when the power will be cut will not help unless I am misunderstanding you. If the data-center loses power for even a minute the generators will all fire up and then every ATS will count-down and transfer in 30 seconds. Battery backup only lasts just long enough to do a quick return to service on a failed generator and even that is sketchy at best. A properly engineered data-center can run on reduced generator capacity. If you know when the power will be cut, you can start the generators before the cut, and depending on your equipment, you may be able to synchronize the generator(s) with the grid and switch over without hitting the batteries. I assume big datacenters are on three phase, can you switch over each phase as it crosses zero, or do you need to do them all at once?
    - Bender 1y ago
      At least in the data-centers I helped manage the inverters were in-line running 100% duty-cycle, meaning frequency sync is not required as there is no bypass. The servers never see the raw commercial power. Data-centers in the US are indeed 3-phase. FWIW the big Cats did have controllers that would maintain sync even when commercial power was gone but we did not need it. There wasn't even a way to physically merge commercial and generator power. ATS inputs and outputs were a binary choice. I know what you mean though, the generators I worked with in the military had a manual frequency sync that required slowly turning a dial and watching light bulbs that got brighter with frequency offset. Very old equipment for Mystic Star, post-WWII era equipment. 50's to 90's
      - jimmygrapes 1y ago
        Manually syncing several of the MEP012 generators was always far more stressful to me than any physical dangers!
        Bender 1y ago
        I bet. I never messed with the trailer or skid mounted generators. It sounds like you were also USAF. At least modern day noise cancelling headphones are much better. Guessing you probably have tinnitus from working on them. At least I think that is partially where mine came from.
- vel0city 1y ago
  If they cannot handle the grid power being pulled due to load shedding, they have no business handling critical applications.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    In particular there is no way you can predict when a backhoe will take our your power line. (Even if they call to get lines located - sometimes the mark is in the wrong spot, though most are they didn't call in the first place). There are lots of other ways the power can go down suddenly and nothing you can do about it except have some other redundancy.
- nradov 1y ago
  All of the major cloud EHRs run in multiple availability zones.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    The data center might be... but are all fiber routers, amplifiers, PoPs etc. along the line from the datacenter to the hospitals and other healthcare providers backed up as well? Particularly the "last mile" often enough is only equipped with batteries to bridge over small brownouts or outages, but not with full fledged diesel engines. And while hospitals, at least those that deal with operating patients, are on battery banks and huge ass diesel engines... private small practices usually are not, if you're lucky the main server has a half broken UPS where no one ever looked after that "BATTERY FAULT" red light for a year. But the desktop computers, VPN nodes, card readers or medical equipment? If it's not something that a power outage could ruin (such as a MRT), it's probably not even battery backed. There's a German saying "the emperor is naked, he has no clothes". When it comes to the resilience of our healthcare infrastructure, the emperor isn't just naked, the emperor's skin is rotting away.
    - nradov 1y ago
      Starlink
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      Just pointing out that none of those non-data-center buildings are data centers. I really doubt the classification of "data centers and other large, non-critical power consumers" extends to telecom infrastructure.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        > I really doubt the classification of "data centers and other large, non-critical power consumers" extends to telecom infrastructure. That's the point. Okay, cool, the datacenter is highly available, multiple power and data feeds, 24/7/365. But that highly available datacenter is useless when it cannot be reached because its data feed elements or the clients don't have power.
- tw04 1y ago
  If power is out everywhere for an extended period of time, they aren’t doing anything but life saving surgery. Pulling up an EMR will be near the bottom of the list of concerns.
  - vineyardmike 1y ago
    Yea, that’s not how medicine works. There are patients that are in the hospital beds for a variety of reasons, and they don’t just go home during a storm. Those people still need some level of care, even if they’re not getting XRays and basic preventative care. EMRs contain a record of when patients last took some critical but dangerous drug, what their allergies and reactions are, and many other important bits of information. When one of the patients starts to exhibit some new symptom or reaction (very stressful situation!), doctors and nurses look at the EMR to understand the best course of treatment or intervention. When the EMR goes down, doctors and nurses revert to pen and paper. It’s very slow, and requires a lot of human handoff - which, critically, they’re less practiced in.
    - tw04 1y ago
      I literally help design IT resiliency for hospitals. This is absolutely how they work and part of their disaster planning. When there is an extended power outage they stop anything but vital surgery and work off pen and paper. Which you got to after spending 3 paragraphs talking about what an EMR is for.
lowwave 1y ago
Nice to know that, but are the data-centers Carrington Event proof? Always wondered that, but never worked in a data-center.
lokar 1y ago
For any big facility there will be pretty strict EPA limits on how long you can run the generators each year.
- Bender 1y ago
  Indeed. I have faith that Texas will find a way around such rules especially if they are being regulated into running them. A Texas company I worked for was highly proficient in maximum shrugs.
- more_corn 1y ago
  The EPA doesn’t really have the resources to enforce that. And certainly won’t have that capability under the trump administration.
- dylan604 1y ago
  The EPA? Are they still a thing? I doubt anyone is concerned about the EPA under current management.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    Which is great. Until there's new management. You can't run a business by seesaw. Best to just count on that rule being enforced and place the necessary battery backups and wind or solar in place to backstop the diesel. Then make any users who need to use those data centers eat that extra cost. There's no problem with us-east costing less than us-west, and us-texas costing most of all. That's how markets work.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      But the seesaw is what the future is going to look like. If some bit of mass voting breaks out for the next election and moves to the other party, there will be a swing back the other direction. Then the following election the masses will get upset about something and swing it back. The country is too polarized to expect anything other than seesaw policies. Unless we go full revolution and just deny the other party from ever taking charge.
abeppu 1y ago
I wasn't involved in the specific details but I remember being told that during the power outage from hurricane Sandy, even datacenters that had sufficient generators had trouble getting the diesel to keep them running, because everyone wanted diesel at the same time and both the supply and distribution were bottlenecked. How long can most DCs run with just the fuel onhand? Have standards around that changed over time?
- stogot 1y ago
  I recall ranges I’ve heard from operators as 24h to upwards of 72 (rare)
- jabart 1y ago
  At a call center, that had a whole datacenter in the basement. They had two weeks of fuel on hand at all times. Being on a border of a state, they also had a 2nd grid connection in case one failed. The whole area lost power for weeks but gym was open 24/7 which became very busy during that time.
- stevetron 1y ago
  It seems to me that Hurricane Sandy caused an issue with fueling backup generators in a New York City datacenter, where there was a bucket-brigade of people carrying fuel in pails up flights of steps several stories.
  - abeppu 1y ago
    I remember hearing this story at the time but have forgotten all the details. I think it involved a pretty well known company? I also remember hearing that some DC in NJ got special priority in getting diesel in the following days because some federal government services were hosted there and so it was treated as a national security issue to keep them supplied.
    - kalleboo 1y ago
      It reminds me of the blog during Hurricane Katrina, with the guy carrying barrels of fuel up the stairs to the 10th floor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_(blog) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_(blog)
chaz6 1y ago
Are they clean enough to stay within the limits of regulations around pollution when run for long periods of time?
- Bender 1y ago
  The generators I worked with were just massive diesel engines the size of a tractor trailer each. This was pre-def, pre-cat requirements. When I would switch on multiple load banks at once I could get a small puff of soot as the engines revved up. Provided the load was not varying heavily they would at least run clean enough that one could not see or smell any exhaust. This was in the 2000 time frame. Mind you the load tests are not real-world realistic at all and this can be further mitigated using step-start programmable PDU's in the data-center. Companies that own data-centers usually have a lot of political pull with the cities due to all the assorted taxes they pay, direct and indirect revenue and employees they bring in. Cat has since added options for hydrogen [1] but I have no idea how many people have bought them. [1] - https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/electric-power/electric-power-sustainability.html https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/electric-power/electri...
f1shy 1y ago
I get your point, but saying “is ok to cut power, they have backup” isn’t a little bit kind of deviance? For example in a hospital this kind of thinking would be totally unacceptable IMHO
- doubled112 1y ago
  Are data centers as life or death as a hospital? Also, the data center I use has run from generator power for days after storms with NO quality of service loss. Nothing like some real world testing to remind me they have this figured out. Is a hospital in the same situation? Or is only part of the hospital on those generators?
  - f1shy 1y ago
    Of course not all, depends, but I worked in a telco; and pretty much yes. Without datacenter, no cell phones (or trunking in the case I know) so no ambulance, no police, no firefighters (or a very delayed version) We had batteries and 2 generators, and once we were minutes from blackout, as the primary generator failed, and the secondary was not dimensioned to cope with the load of AA of a 45 celsius day
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  Hospitals are obligated by law and building code to have backup generators with multiple (at least 3) separate backup power feeds for critical branch, life safety branch, and equipment branch. These are defined as ‘essential loads’ by the National Electrical Code. They can all be fed from the same generator but must use separate overcurrent protection and automatic transfer switches. Critical branch is defined as loads that are used for direct patient care, plus ‘additional task lighting, receptacles, and circuits needed for effective hospital operation.’ Life safety branch is the fire alarm system and emergency lighting, plus elevator lights and controls, medgas alarms, PA/notification systems used during building evacuation, and some generator accessories. Equipment branch has some require items including OR cooling, patient room heating, and data rooms. Some hospitals will add MRIs, non-patient care HVAC, and chillers (for air conditioning) on the generator backup system as well. There’s typically a fourth system for everything else (‘normal’ power) that is not backed by a generator. Non-emergency lighting, convenience receptacles, and other non-essential loads are on this system.
stronglikedan 1y ago
> did not buy enough generator capacity to run everything Maybe they can cap it for most cases - we'll turn it off for n number of days max - so that companies have a target to prepare for (or maybe that was already mentioned). Of course, no one can prepare for anything, but if it's longer than that then most other things are probably also affected anyway and no one is worried about their favorite data center.
duxup 1y ago
When I worked in a different career I worked with big banks and did disaster recovery tests (we didn't run the tests we just had equipment that the tests sort of centered around). We'd basically cut of a data center for a weekend and they would run from another data center that was supposed to have all the data there too. We'd even move their check processing to a backup site and they'd truck full truckloads of paper checks to a backup site. They were legit tests at the offline site too too, they'd power down equipment, and power it up and we'd fix what didn't come back up. Even the data centers would be fully powered off to test. At least at that time those banks did not skimp on those big tests and it was a big effort and pretty dang well run / complete.

by Bender 1y ago

Shank 1y ago

This is true, but how long will firm load shed events last, and how many of them will happen? In California, when CAISO has events that lead to firm load shedding, they're predictable, rolling blackouts and everyone knows how long they'll last, and they're assigned on a customer-specific basis. You know your power will be cut, and you know it will be a certain amount of time, and you know roughly where you are in the schedule. I could see operators of datacenters in Texas wondering about this. Also, it's underrated how much critical infrastructure is dependent on datacenters running. Like, are you going to pull someone's EHR system down that serves a local hospital, while keeping the local hospital on a critical circuit?

Bender 1y ago
You know your power will be cut, and you know it will be a certain amount of time, and you know roughly where you are in the schedule. Knowing when the power will be cut will not help unless I am misunderstanding you. If the data-center loses power for even a minute the generators will all fire up and then every ATS will count-down and transfer in 30 seconds. Battery backup only lasts just long enough to do a quick return to service on a failed generator and even that is sketchy at best. A properly engineered data-center can run on reduced generator capacity. Some data-centers are indeed on circuits deemed to be critical but I could see regulations changing this so that they are "business critical" vs. "life support critical" and some changes could be made at substations so that data-centers could participate in shedding. I think you are right that they will be thinking about this and adding to this probably filing preemptive lawsuits to protect their business. Such changes can violate SLA contracts businesses have with power companies and Texas is very pro-business so I can not compare it to California.
- toast0 1y ago
  > Knowing when the power will be cut will not help unless I am misunderstanding you. If the data-center loses power for even a minute the generators will all fire up and then every ATS will count-down and transfer in 30 seconds. Battery backup only lasts just long enough to do a quick return to service on a failed generator and even that is sketchy at best. A properly engineered data-center can run on reduced generator capacity. If you know when the power will be cut, you can start the generators before the cut, and depending on your equipment, you may be able to synchronize the generator(s) with the grid and switch over without hitting the batteries. I assume big datacenters are on three phase, can you switch over each phase as it crosses zero, or do you need to do them all at once?
  - Bender 1y ago
    At least in the data-centers I helped manage the inverters were in-line running 100% duty-cycle, meaning frequency sync is not required as there is no bypass. The servers never see the raw commercial power. Data-centers in the US are indeed 3-phase. FWIW the big Cats did have controllers that would maintain sync even when commercial power was gone but we did not need it. There wasn't even a way to physically merge commercial and generator power. ATS inputs and outputs were a binary choice. I know what you mean though, the generators I worked with in the military had a manual frequency sync that required slowly turning a dial and watching light bulbs that got brighter with frequency offset. Very old equipment for Mystic Star, post-WWII era equipment. 50's to 90's
    - jimmygrapes 1y ago
      Manually syncing several of the MEP012 generators was always far more stressful to me than any physical dangers!
      - Bender 1y ago
        I bet. I never messed with the trailer or skid mounted generators. It sounds like you were also USAF. At least modern day noise cancelling headphones are much better. Guessing you probably have tinnitus from working on them. At least I think that is partially where mine came from.
vel0city 1y ago
If they cannot handle the grid power being pulled due to load shedding, they have no business handling critical applications.
- bluGill 1y ago
  In particular there is no way you can predict when a backhoe will take our your power line. (Even if they call to get lines located - sometimes the mark is in the wrong spot, though most are they didn't call in the first place). There are lots of other ways the power can go down suddenly and nothing you can do about it except have some other redundancy.
nradov 1y ago
All of the major cloud EHRs run in multiple availability zones.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The data center might be... but are all fiber routers, amplifiers, PoPs etc. along the line from the datacenter to the hospitals and other healthcare providers backed up as well? Particularly the "last mile" often enough is only equipped with batteries to bridge over small brownouts or outages, but not with full fledged diesel engines. And while hospitals, at least those that deal with operating patients, are on battery banks and huge ass diesel engines... private small practices usually are not, if you're lucky the main server has a half broken UPS where no one ever looked after that "BATTERY FAULT" red light for a year. But the desktop computers, VPN nodes, card readers or medical equipment? If it's not something that a power outage could ruin (such as a MRT), it's probably not even battery backed. There's a German saying "the emperor is naked, he has no clothes". When it comes to the resilience of our healthcare infrastructure, the emperor isn't just naked, the emperor's skin is rotting away.
  - nradov 1y ago
    Starlink
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    Just pointing out that none of those non-data-center buildings are data centers. I really doubt the classification of "data centers and other large, non-critical power consumers" extends to telecom infrastructure.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > I really doubt the classification of "data centers and other large, non-critical power consumers" extends to telecom infrastructure. That's the point. Okay, cool, the datacenter is highly available, multiple power and data feeds, 24/7/365. But that highly available datacenter is useless when it cannot be reached because its data feed elements or the clients don't have power.
tw04 1y ago
If power is out everywhere for an extended period of time, they aren’t doing anything but life saving surgery. Pulling up an EMR will be near the bottom of the list of concerns.
- vineyardmike 1y ago
  Yea, that’s not how medicine works. There are patients that are in the hospital beds for a variety of reasons, and they don’t just go home during a storm. Those people still need some level of care, even if they’re not getting XRays and basic preventative care. EMRs contain a record of when patients last took some critical but dangerous drug, what their allergies and reactions are, and many other important bits of information. When one of the patients starts to exhibit some new symptom or reaction (very stressful situation!), doctors and nurses look at the EMR to understand the best course of treatment or intervention. When the EMR goes down, doctors and nurses revert to pen and paper. It’s very slow, and requires a lot of human handoff - which, critically, they’re less practiced in.
  - tw04 1y ago
    I literally help design IT resiliency for hospitals. This is absolutely how they work and part of their disaster planning. When there is an extended power outage they stop anything but vital surgery and work off pen and paper. Which you got to after spending 3 paragraphs talking about what an EMR is for.

lowwave 1y ago

Nice to know that, but are the data-centers Carrington Event proof? Always wondered that, but never worked in a data-center.

lokar 1y ago

For any big facility there will be pretty strict EPA limits on how long you can run the generators each year.

Bender 1y ago
Indeed. I have faith that Texas will find a way around such rules especially if they are being regulated into running them. A Texas company I worked for was highly proficient in maximum shrugs.
more_corn 1y ago
The EPA doesn’t really have the resources to enforce that. And certainly won’t have that capability under the trump administration.
dylan604 1y ago
The EPA? Are they still a thing? I doubt anyone is concerned about the EPA under current management.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  Which is great. Until there's new management. You can't run a business by seesaw. Best to just count on that rule being enforced and place the necessary battery backups and wind or solar in place to backstop the diesel. Then make any users who need to use those data centers eat that extra cost. There's no problem with us-east costing less than us-west, and us-texas costing most of all. That's how markets work.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    But the seesaw is what the future is going to look like. If some bit of mass voting breaks out for the next election and moves to the other party, there will be a swing back the other direction. Then the following election the masses will get upset about something and swing it back. The country is too polarized to expect anything other than seesaw policies. Unless we go full revolution and just deny the other party from ever taking charge.

abeppu 1y ago

I wasn't involved in the specific details but I remember being told that during the power outage from hurricane Sandy, even datacenters that had sufficient generators had trouble getting the diesel to keep them running, because everyone wanted diesel at the same time and both the supply and distribution were bottlenecked. How long can most DCs run with just the fuel onhand? Have standards around that changed over time?

stogot 1y ago
I recall ranges I’ve heard from operators as 24h to upwards of 72 (rare)
jabart 1y ago
At a call center, that had a whole datacenter in the basement. They had two weeks of fuel on hand at all times. Being on a border of a state, they also had a 2nd grid connection in case one failed. The whole area lost power for weeks but gym was open 24/7 which became very busy during that time.
stevetron 1y ago
It seems to me that Hurricane Sandy caused an issue with fueling backup generators in a New York City datacenter, where there was a bucket-brigade of people carrying fuel in pails up flights of steps several stories.
- abeppu 1y ago
  I remember hearing this story at the time but have forgotten all the details. I think it involved a pretty well known company? I also remember hearing that some DC in NJ got special priority in getting diesel in the following days because some federal government services were hosted there and so it was treated as a national security issue to keep them supplied.
  - kalleboo 1y ago
    It reminds me of the blog during Hurricane Katrina, with the guy carrying barrels of fuel up the stairs to the 10th floor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_(blog) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_(blog)

chaz6 1y ago

Are they clean enough to stay within the limits of regulations around pollution when run for long periods of time?

Bender 1y ago
The generators I worked with were just massive diesel engines the size of a tractor trailer each. This was pre-def, pre-cat requirements. When I would switch on multiple load banks at once I could get a small puff of soot as the engines revved up. Provided the load was not varying heavily they would at least run clean enough that one could not see or smell any exhaust. This was in the 2000 time frame. Mind you the load tests are not real-world realistic at all and this can be further mitigated using step-start programmable PDU's in the data-center. Companies that own data-centers usually have a lot of political pull with the cities due to all the assorted taxes they pay, direct and indirect revenue and employees they bring in. Cat has since added options for hydrogen [1] but I have no idea how many people have bought them. [1] - https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/electric-power/electric-power-sustainability.html https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/electric-power/electri...

f1shy 1y ago

I get your point, but saying “is ok to cut power, they have backup” isn’t a little bit kind of deviance? For example in a hospital this kind of thinking would be totally unacceptable IMHO

doubled112 1y ago
Are data centers as life or death as a hospital? Also, the data center I use has run from generator power for days after storms with NO quality of service loss. Nothing like some real world testing to remind me they have this figured out. Is a hospital in the same situation? Or is only part of the hospital on those generators?
- f1shy 1y ago
  Of course not all, depends, but I worked in a telco; and pretty much yes. Without datacenter, no cell phones (or trunking in the case I know) so no ambulance, no police, no firefighters (or a very delayed version) We had batteries and 2 generators, and once we were minutes from blackout, as the primary generator failed, and the secondary was not dimensioned to cope with the load of AA of a 45 celsius day
quickthrowman 1y ago
Hospitals are obligated by law and building code to have backup generators with multiple (at least 3) separate backup power feeds for critical branch, life safety branch, and equipment branch. These are defined as ‘essential loads’ by the National Electrical Code. They can all be fed from the same generator but must use separate overcurrent protection and automatic transfer switches. Critical branch is defined as loads that are used for direct patient care, plus ‘additional task lighting, receptacles, and circuits needed for effective hospital operation.’ Life safety branch is the fire alarm system and emergency lighting, plus elevator lights and controls, medgas alarms, PA/notification systems used during building evacuation, and some generator accessories. Equipment branch has some require items including OR cooling, patient room heating, and data rooms. Some hospitals will add MRIs, non-patient care HVAC, and chillers (for air conditioning) on the generator backup system as well. There’s typically a fourth system for everything else (‘normal’ power) that is not backed by a generator. Non-emergency lighting, convenience receptacles, and other non-essential loads are on this system.

stronglikedan 1y ago

> did not buy enough generator capacity to run everything Maybe they can cap it for most cases - we'll turn it off for n number of days max - so that companies have a target to prepare for (or maybe that was already mentioned). Of course, no one can prepare for anything, but if it's longer than that then most other things are probably also affected anyway and no one is worried about their favorite data center.

duxup 1y ago

When I worked in a different career I worked with big banks and did disaster recovery tests (we didn't run the tests we just had equipment that the tests sort of centered around). We'd basically cut of a data center for a weekend and they would run from another data center that was supposed to have all the data there too. We'd even move their check processing to a backup site and they'd truck full truckloads of paper checks to a backup site. They were legit tests at the offline site too too, they'd power down equipment, and power it up and we'd fix what didn't come back up. Even the data centers would be fully powered off to test. At least at that time those banks did not skimp on those big tests and it was a big effort and pretty dang well run / complete.