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Comment by pyvpx | Hacker News Reader

despite best efforts, sometimes the generators don't kick in. sometimes not all of them kick in. sometimes one ATS in one feed in one section that just happens to house one half of an important switch chassis doesn't work as it did during tests last quarter.

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True. But Data centers usually have an A and B power systems independent of each other for redundancy . Equipment is usually connected to both. The failure of either should not cause an outage. (Unless some one is stupid enough to connect core network equipment to only A or B power)

Sometimes only A power or B power is delivered to the rack (otherwise you could receive different phases).

Power failures also occur sometimes when the issue is on the wrong side of where power is distributed - we've lost power to our servers when maintenance has gone wrong for example.

From my point of view if you end up with mission critical equipment connected only to A or B power then its engineered wrong.

Very true, but sometimes this happens at fault of the facility, not the affected company. I've been in a facility experiencing widespread power issues because customers were incorrectly delivered A+A or B+B power, instead of A+B.

This is why I'm a proponent battery floated of DC Power for mission critical systems.

Exactly. You can only test for these scenarios to a certain extent and even when everything works as expected during tests, things still tend to break during production when shit hits the fan.

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