Power outages in your data centre can be caused by a range of factors, including natural disasters and human error. More importantly, they can often result in a break in service, damage to equipment and significant monetary loss.
Accidents, downed power lines, grid over-demands, lightning strikes and other natural disasters can all act as catalysts for power outages. With this in mind, it is essential to check your UPSs work and your generator responds appropriately. One way of doing this is by simulating a power failure in your facility, to ensure the backup generator performs as intended in the event of a power failure.
The thought of a blackout occurring particularly within a critical moment is naturally unnerving, so actively simulating a power failure is a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Some benefits of data centre blackout testing are;
What are the consequences?
The risks involved with having a power outage differ from company to company, as organisations in some sectors stand to lose a lot more than others. Similarly, other factors such as the equipment housed in your data centre can pose different variants of risk.
One of 2bm’s customers reported they would lose £2-3m for every hour their power is down. However, it is not just the duration of time the power is down that should be accounted for when calculating your resilience and potential losses, but also the time taken to get systems back up and fully operational again. This therefore in that particular customer’s case would amount to a huge sum of lost money.
The smartest data centres are ready for the future
2bm can perform blackout testing on a quarterly or one-off basis.
Omitting to perform data centre blackout tests could leave you in a position where you have complete and uninformed reliance on the operation of your existing kit, potentially leaving you open to significant risk.
Don’t wait until it’s too late, get in touch with our team of data centre experts today!
A blackout testing service to assess a facility’s vulnerability to power outages
Performance and business continuity plan in the event of a blackout
