It’s nearly 50 years since the UK last suffered from sustained power blackouts; back then, very few businesses had computer equipment of any kind to worry about. Now, for a variety of reasons, the nation faces a potential energy shortage, and it’s been suggested that planned outages – perhaps from 4pm to 7pm on the coldest winter weekdays – could be necessary to manage the limited supply.
Of course, it’s far from certain that things will come to that. Even so, the mere possibility of wide-ranging power cuts should make IT managers take notice. For decades we’ve been paying lip service to ideas of power management and resilience. Now it’s time to get serious about the prospect of spending at least a few hours with no electricity.
Down together, up in turns
Perhaps because outages are so rare, there’s a lot of misapprehension and misinformation out there concerning what happens to your computers and servers when the power abruptly goes out. To be fair, there’s an observational element to this: at some point, I’m sure every professional has yanked power leads out, disconnected network storage, bashed loose RAM and so forth. Experience tells us that an unplanned shutdown (or crash) doesn’t inevitably lead to disastrous data loss.
Coming back up again, however, is a whole different kettle of fish. One factor that’s easy to overlook is the nature of the electricity grid itself. If you’ve accidentally unplugged a computer from the mains,
