When the lights went out in South Australia and the entire state was hit by power outages, for energy infrastructure provider Emerson Network Power, the protection of crucial information stored in data centres under its management, required a rapid response to calls for assistance from customers.
It was Emerson’s backup battery-powered Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) systems deployed by many of its customers, particularly SMEs in Adelaide, which kicked in when the blackout first hit, giving those customers a chance to protect data by backing out of applications and closing down servers before the batteries ran out.
And, according to Emerson, there were no reports of data losses by any of the company’s customers thanks to the UPS systems taking over when the blackout started last Wednesday.
Asked if any customers had lost data, Emerson Service Director Ross Hammond said: “We would hope not, we would hope everyone, certainly all the ones we spoke to, were doing all the shutdowns of all of their servers and backing out of all their applications.
{loadposition peter}“The customers had a pretty good understanding of how long they have got, the UPS tells them how much time they have got remaining and they would then know if there is 15 minutes of battery remaining and it takes 10 mins, they have only got 5 mins to shut down and back out of those applications.
“We’re not aware that any of our customers suffered any data loss .the ones we spoke to all managed to shutdown because they had a fair amount of time to go”
Emerson says it was one of the first electricity providers alerted to the emergency when customers called the company’s offshore contact centre as severe storms lashed Adelaide and other parts of the State.
Hammond told iTWire that initial calls to the 24/7 contact centre were from customers wanting assurance that, with the flashing warning lights signalling a problem, their battery-powered backup Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) systems would continue operating until electricity was ultimately restored.
Hammond says the contact centre was inundated with “triage calls” in the first hours of the blackout, with questions about shutting power equipment down.
“Some did so immediately and others chose to review hour by hour. The most common question was - ‘I only have X amount of hours of battery reserve, what are my options?” .
“Calls were coming in one after the other. Adelaide was gridlocked and we couldn’t get out to service them, so we were providing support by phone to assure them the USP flashing lights and beeping was normal and the machines were operating as they were expected to operate and, as we expected they would.”
“They were looking for reinforcement that, despite the flashing lights, their UPS was working properly. For many they had a battery run time of as little as 20 minutes, or as long as an hour, but no one has a battery to cope with an 8 hour outage.”
In addition to those data centres with UPS, there were data centres powered by diesel generators unaffected when the electricity supply was lost.
Many of Emerson’s customers with big data centres already have diesel generators and Hammond says Emerson is now talking to current and prospective customers about the benefits of diesel for future data centre security.
In the aftermath of the outage, Hammond says Emerson has received “high praise for our engineers…a calming influence when everybody else was thinking the sky was falling in but, it was a 1 in 50 year event and you just have to be prepared for it”.