David Cantrell wrote:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 09:07:01AM +0000, James Laver wrote:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 09:08:10AM +0100, Richard Huxton wrote:
Having said that, there are clearly plenty of applications where
power-failure isn't an overriding worry.
Or 'on any machine connected to a UPS that's correctly configured to
shut the machine down properly'?
Or 'on any machine in a datacenter with generators for backup power'.
These things are being marketed for use in desktops.
Indeed, in residential areas with flaky power, a simple UPS which evens out
the power spikes and can provide valuable minutes to shutdown your PC is
well worth the £50 or so that it costs, as it will save you in 95% of
situations.
For big hosting operations when uptime is critical, everything gets
exponentially more complicated as you factor in everything that can
possibly go wrong. Also regardless of what systems people put in place, you
can never discount the human factor to mess it up and turn off the wrong
thing at the wrong time. Like disconnecting and testing the UPS batteries
while another team decides to test the failover circuit between UPS battery
banks and switches the datacentre power to pull from the disconnected bank.
Paul
