Keeping the Data Flowing

What happened the last time your house lost power? That email you were writing might have had to wait an extra half an hour, and your refrigerator might have warmed a few degrees. At most, ordinary power outages represent a minor annoyance to the home or office.

The situation is different at the massive data centers of the world. Amazon now sells over 600 items per second, and their systems are designed to accommodate up to 1,000,0000 transactions per second. At this scale, a 20 minute power outage at one of the data centers powering its store could cost Amazon millions of dollars in lost revenue.

To avoid this sort of catastrophe, the world’s big data centers strive to meet the Uptime Institute’s “Tier-Standards,” specifying various levels of guaranteed data processing availability, reliability, and redundancy. Meeting these standards requires avoiding single-points of failure — all components must have redundant backups.

One of the most critical components, of course, is the power supply system: without power, the flow of data grinds to a halt. Although massive data centers pull their power from the public electric grid, they must have redundant systems of backup power ready to go. Stored power in batteries is important, but the real backup system is the diesel generator.

Managing the reliability and redundancy of their generator systems is a significant challenge for data centers. It’s an unfortunate reality that components break and systems fail tests. At many data centers, the fuel system supplying the generator will have components from a legion of vendors, not one of whom will understand (or take responsibility for) the whole system. This can make troubleshooting routine systems failures a nightmare.

Working with a company that provides a fully integrated system is essential – from the fuel tanks and pump systems to the monitoring devices and control systems. Therefore if a problem arises, data centers have a single support call to make. A single source contact will understand how the pieces work together and can quickly solve problems. It’s the difference between working with a parts manufacturer with a few engineers on staff, and an engineering design firm that manufacturer’s the parts.

At Preferred Utilities we specialize in fuel systems—it’s what we do all day, every day—we pride ourselves on designing reliable systems that reduce the need for support calls in the first place. Data center engineering teams are generalists and great at looking at the big picture, so when it comes to fuel systems, they often aren’t able to immerse themselves in the details the way our engineers do. We know the code compliance specs, how to make sure the tank size is correct, and how to optimize virtually any scenario to help data centers at all Tier levels to keep the their fuel, power, and data flowing.

If your company or industry requires this kind of technical expertise, you can reach Preferred Utilities Manufacturing Corporation at (203)-743-6741. We are dedicated to your success. People. Products. Results.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.