Data Center Power System

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Russs57

Senior Member
Location
Miami, Florida, USA
Occupation
Maintenance Engineer
Do everything wrong and you are looking at as short as 6 months to maybe a year. Do everything right and you can get ten years or more.

Doing it right involves buying pre-treated fuel that meets certain standards. Fuel tank design/installation plays a part. Regular testing, treatment, polishing/filtering, and having the right type of filters near point of usage is required. Keep your tanks full too.

P.S. don't forget to treat day tanks like storage tanks. Main thing is keep that fuel clean, cool, and dry. For example, above ground tanks in sunny/hot/humid climates is a poor choice.
 

PaulMmn

Senior Member
Location
Union, KY, USA
Occupation
EIT - Engineer in Training, Lafayette College
Pharmaceutical companies can wait until the power comes back on...

Not really-- when I worked at the hot dog stand, guys from the vitamin C factory down the road would come in for lunch. They told about one inspector who asked, "What if I turn off that mixer... like this!" and he turned it off.

Now, the official procedure called for a complete flush-and-restart of the whole line.

All they did was reach out and turn the mixer back on. When asked why, they said for the short time the power was off, the mixture in the tank barely had time to slow down, let alone stop.

Also, consider the banks of eggs with antibiotic cultures growing inside. They have to be maintained at a constant temperature!

Pharma companies can't be without power either!
 

mbrooke

Batteries Included
Location
United States
Occupation
Technician
Do everything wrong and you are looking at as short as 6 months to maybe a year. Do everything right and you can get ten years or more.

Doing it right involves buying pre-treated fuel that meets certain standards. Fuel tank design/installation plays a part. Regular testing, treatment, polishing/filtering, and having the right type of filters near point of usage is required. Keep your tanks full too.

P.S. don't forget to treat day tanks like storage tanks. Main thing is keep that fuel clean, cool, and dry. For example, above ground tanks in sunny/hot/humid climates is a poor choice.

Or, you can just use that same fuel tanks for oil heat :p
 

hbiss

EC, Westchester, New York NEC: 2014
Location
Hawthorne, New York NEC: 2014
Occupation
EC
If the power goes down for an entire facility or geographical area, what good does it do to spend all that money to keep the data center up and running?

It goes back to my post above. Sarcastic perhaps, but true.

-Hal
 

PaulMmn

Senior Member
Location
Union, KY, USA
Occupation
EIT - Engineer in Training, Lafayette College
If the power goes down for an entire facility or geographical area, what good does it do to spend all that money to keep the data center up and running?

It goes back to my post above. Sarcastic perhaps, but true.

-Hal

At some point the data center manager calls the next higher up in the food chain, and so on, and so on, until someone sighs, and recognizes that the power wont' be back up for a while, and tells the IT group to switch everything over the The Hot Site. This is another computer center, with all the capabilities of the original. The hot site is, hopefully, outside of the geographical area and immune to the calamity which has befallen the original facility.

It's an insurance policy-- What's it cost to have the duplicate generators, and the duplicate data center, compared to the how much it would cost the company in lost productivity and sales when the computer center is not available?
 

RumRunner

Senior Member
Location
SCV Ca, USA
Occupation
Retired EE
Hal wrote:

If the power goes down for an entire facility or geographical area, what good does it do to spend all that money to keep the data center up and running?

It goes back to my post above. Sarcastic perhaps, but true.

-Hal



.........

It is not just keeping the data center up and running. . .it is primarily for keeping the whole backbone of the entire company's computer system.
Unplanned stoppage could corrupt everything that could lead to unrecoverrable lost data including codes that are the brains of the company's computer systems.

Of course some companies can use the CLOUD to restore data but not all companies trust the cloud because of privacy and intellectual properties they want to keep themselves.

There is a place in Scandinavia that serves as repository for all computer codes that were ever written that store information about every knowledge human possesses-- from the map of our DNA to nuclear energy.
This compilation also includes manuscripts in digital format-- the library of Christian formative years from the Vatican.
This repository is called GitHub that is owned by Microsoft. It was acquired from European code writers.

This "code vault" is inside an abandoned mine deep in the mountains of Svalbard, Norway.
It also houses the Seed Bank where every seed of every plant on earth is kept.

This is to insure that earth will have a chance-- and for humanity to recover in case of a catastrophic event that will wipe out most or all living things on earth.

From Wikipedia:

"The fundamental software that underpins GitHub is Git itself, written by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. The additional software that provides the GitHub user interface was written using Ruby on Rails and Erlang by GitHub, Inc. developers Wanstrath,[57] Hyett, and Preston-Werner."


Google it to find out more. I don't have the link.
 

Open Neutral

Senior Member
Location
Inside the Beltway
Occupation
Engineer
How do they refill that 90,000 gallon farm? How much does it cost?

In the 60's/70's, AT&T Long Lines built a coaxial cable network from coast to coast, and Canada to Mexico/Key West. Every 150 miles, there was a Main Station, underground. They were 40,000-120,000 ft^2, with 3ft thick concrete roofs and 2 ft walls. They typically had two White Superior 750KVA Diesels, but later multiple Solar Corp. gas turbines. All this to {in theory} survive WWIII.

They had buried fuel tankage of 80,000-150,000 gallons. They "groomed" the Diesel by pumping it through filters and injection of biocide to keep the critters from growing in it. I have wondered about the long-term usability of the fuel, even with that. I suspect they might mix in a thousand gallons or so of something with lower flashpoint {?gasoline?} to keep the fuel usable.

When they sold off many of the Undergrounds, they pumped out all the Diesel and filled the tanks with cement slurry. An employee of the Lillyville PA site told me that there was a line of cement trucks for hours to accomplish that.
 
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mbrooke

Batteries Included
Location
United States
Occupation
Technician
In the 60's/70's, AT&T Long Lines built a coaxial cable network from coast to coast, and Canada to Mexico/Key West. Every 150 miles, there was a Main Station, underground. They were 40,000-120,000 ft^2, with 3ft thick concrete roofs and 2 ft walls. They typically had two White Superior 750KVA Diesels, but later multiple Solar Corp. gas turbines. All this to {in theory} survive WWIII.

They had buried fuel tankage of 80,000-150,000 gallons. They "groomed" the Diesel by pumping it through filters and injection biocide to keep the critters from growing in it. I have wondered about the long-term usability of the fuel, even with that. I suspect they might mix in a thousand gallons or so of something with lower flashpoint {?gasoline?} to keep the fuel usable.

When they sold off many of the Undergrounds, they pumped out all the Diesel and filled the tanks with cement slurry. An employee of the Lillyville PA site told me that there was a line of cement trucks for hours to accomplish that.

Like this?



http://coldwar-ct.com/Home_Page_S1DO.html
 

PaulMmn

Senior Member
Location
Union, KY, USA
Occupation
EIT - Engineer in Training, Lafayette College
Then there was "The Plot to Bury the Bell System." This is the line from a magazine ad, touting the fact that Bell/AT&T were trying to put as much of their infrastructure underground as possible. Back in the late 1960s the phone company dug up the sidewalks in My Home Town to install their cable from ?the next town over? to our central office. They did a very nice job-- the sidewalks were repaved with concrete-- they looked better than they had in years! (only sad part was that some of the sidewalks were large slabs of slate that were not replaced).

And at one point (this was back when the Carter Phone decision was pending) the phone company gave tours of their new central office-- much of the facility was below ground level (office up top, IIRC). Generator out back, and a bank of batteries to run the installation if power should actually glitch. And a row of motors, spinning, to give us the dial tone (this was before ESS arrived in town).

Downstairs, there were some emergency facilities to handle 'sleepovers' in case of insurrection or other civil disturbance. Nothing as complicated as the cold war site!
 

mbrooke

Batteries Included
Location
United States
Occupation
Technician
Yes, that site has a good photo album of an Underground's construction. They were anything but trivial. The larger ones held AUTOVON/FTS switches. They were always outside of major targets err cities.

Fascinating how they did it. Even more so the giant phone network underneath our feet.
 
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