Lessons From Recent Power Outages

[Terry Fox]

Energy Wise - 07/18/2012Um, isn’t blaming the grid kind of burying your head in the sand?  If they are supposed to have such a fantastic and reliable Cloud, shouldn’t their cloud support include on-site backup power facilities?  And, there should not be an “secret” or “unknown” closets of fiber that nobody knows about until Virginia Power/Pepco goes bye-bye.

This reminds me of the story about the American University (or was it Howard?) facility that installed a new generator.  When Pepco died, their generator promptly came on, ran for a few hours, then died.  Somehow the pump that fills the day tank from the main tank was wired to Pepco instead of the generator, and the small day tank ran dry.  Oops.

I guess the Elastic got stretched too thin, and things did not computer anymore.  All this because the virtual cloud got bumped offline by a few very real clouds.

In the old days, this would be a true “teaching moment”, bordering on a firing offense.  Being offline for an hour or two could be excusable, but for days?
Terry, WB4JFI


From: Andre Kesteloot 
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 2:54 PM
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Subject: Lessons From Recent Power Outages






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                                News and opinions on sustainable power, cars, and climate July 18, 2012 
                         
                                 
                               Lessons From Recent Power Outages

                                by Bill Sweet

                                The cloud might be above it all, but the stuff upon which it rests clearly isn’t. On 6 July, a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms left 750 000 people without power in Northern Virginia and took out Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud server facility. This local weather event left Amazon cloud customers such as Netflix, Instagram, Perest, and Heroku without access to their databases for days, and made these services unavailable to Web users around the globe. Observers have rightly asked what can be done to improve the grid so that virtual systems aren’t so vulnerable to real-world events. Researchers are already on the case, with software for improved monitoring of transmission lines and a big smart-grid pilot project that will test networking, communication, and distribution-management tools in an effort to speed up identification of problems and the dispatch of technicians to trouble spots.  
                         
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