Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

A month ago on the thread about AWS opening up a region in Sweden, a discussion ensued [1] about the lack of major cloud provider datacenters in Africa.

I wrote [2] that a good site in Africa would be challenging, because one would have to "pick a spot touched by more than one thick pipe, in jurisdiction known for political and civic stability and a regime with rough compatibility to the ideology and national security apparatus of western allies -- their home base and primary source of customers; receptive and promoting of foreign investment, and having access to multiple reliable, redundant power sources from which to draw energy."

While South Africa ranks high on stability and ideological compatibility, and reasonably on fiber [3], my understanding was that reliable and redundant utility power supply is a significant issue [4][5]. I'd be curious to see whether co-generation will be used to overcome these limitations.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031565 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14035251 [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Cable_ma... [4] http://www.fin24.com/Economy/SA-fears-dark-days-ahead-as-pow... [4] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/03/crippling-... [5] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/03/crippling-...

I am seeing a lot of comments about the need for stable power. It seems logical, but it’s not an absolute need. I managed a data center win San Diego at the time of the California electrical power crisis [1] near the end of the Dot Com days. I have operated more than one at a time since. During those times, which produced rolling blackouts, we just ended up running our generators more often. Power outages in Data Center happen during maintenance and upgrades, not so much during power grid outages. I have still never never had a data center go down during a power grid outage… but have seen many during upgrades, and maintenance.

In the years since the rolling blackouts, I have been colocated in data centers that have made the decision to use special pricing available from the power utility, available when you can have a preemptable load… during peak hours of peak season the power company can tell you to get off the grid with short notice. The data center operators did OK when they did this for most years. They got a lower price on power all year, in exchange for running their generators more. I’d say that the typical year, they ran the generators for several hours per day for 7 to 10 days in the Summer months. The last year they dd this, they ran a much higher number of days than expected… maybe 15 - 18 days from noon to 7pm. I understand they had to stop doing this because of the pollution of the generators or the permits required for such heavy usage... but that info is not first hand. It could have been many other reasons such as neighbors complaining about the noise in the business parks (2MW diesel generators are deafeningly loud), costs related to running the generators for so many hours, etc.

To operate like this, you have to be on your game for maintenance of the generators and checklists and training. You also have to have multiple contracts with fuel delivery trucks, just incase your outage lasts for a while. These data centers were all under 5MW in size each. We never lost critical load during a power supplier outage. I hope I have illustrated that a reliable power supply is not strictly required to run a reliable data center or service that is dependent upon a reliable data center.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

SA experienced power challenges few years back, but those issues are long gone. I haven't experienced any power cuts in over a year now.

Is it just me or is one year a pretty low bar to set for granting a problem the title of "long gone"?

I consider it long gone because a permanent solution was put in place. Any problem disappearing for over a year is considered long gone in any country. Not about setting a low bar. In fact, I have heard politicians claiming to have fixed problems less than 100 days after they were put into power.

Given the context of what caused those power issues: - lack of maintenance (not non-existence of maintenance) for almost 2 decades - the electrification of more homes without bringing on additional capacity - poor/subpar management of the sole power producer

A year or so is fine because those issues have been resolved by: - a slower economy (I'm putting this here because we shot ourselves on the foot) - more generational power coming in - the rise of independent power-producers.

So there should be stability from a power generation perspective.

It's "long gone" because depending on which part of society you come from, you might have gone a few years without experiencing load-based power issues.

In general the power issues still exist once you step out of the suburbs or metros, but then again the DCs will likely be hosted there, or MS will enter into a power agreement that gives them preference over the rest of the average consumer.

I'm just glad that we'll have Azure DCs as a start, and hope Google and Amazon follow suit if MS succeeds.

Google has already started working on this to a degree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Solar_Energy_Project

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