I looked at google street view and only one exhaust pipe for a generator, near the electrical room.
The facility appears to be in some old warehouse (military?) district with brick exterior walls and a wooden roof? If true that's a problem.
Had to laugh, not a solar panel in sight.
How much can the backup power infrastructure be cut back if there's a system to force all CPUs to minimum frequency when running on backup power?
How much can the backup power infrastructure be cut back if there's a system to force all CPUs to minimum frequency when running on backup power?
I run a few sites on virtual servers, with various backup policies (which I won't write about openly for obvious reasons) and if the virtual server company blew up and vanished for ever, I could start up a backup server which is a media PC running on an FTTP (80/30mbps) ADSL line That would actually be fast enough for EEVBLOG, on a bad day.
It is practically impossible to lose everything, in this setup, and it is very cheap.
I looked at google street view and only one exhaust pipe for a generator, near the electrical room.
The facility appears to be in some old warehouse (military?) district with brick exterior walls and a wooden roof? If true that's a problem.
Had to laugh, not a solar panel in sight.
That's a great idea. One issue I can see for a hosting company is that they allow their customers to manage/reinstall to OS and apps. It would be difficult to enforce the installation of power-management software. It would be great if servers had a (let's say) 5 volt input, and when it dropped to below 1 volt, the BIOS would throttle the CPU down. Then you "just" run a 5 volt line run off of non-UPS, non-generator mains to each server and you're golden.
That probably wouldn't work. If you're running near your CPU provision, you can enter a thing called "load hysteresis" which may be irrecoverable. This is where your load average goes above the total capacity and the CPUs can never catch up with the workload. It requires adding much much more capacity than you had to start with before you can being the demand you had originally. Either that or breaking a huge chunk of your incoming load to recover.
How much can the backup power infrastructure be cut back if there's a system to force all CPUs to minimum frequency when running on backup power?
That's a great idea.
How much can the backup power infrastructure be cut back if there's a system to force all CPUs to minimum frequency when running on backup power?
That's a great idea.
No, it is not.
You don't randomly force-throttle a server...
In many cases that would be just as bad of a scenario and you might as well just have pulled the power.
You don't randomly force-throttle a server...
In many cases that would be just as bad of a scenario and you might as well just have pulled the power.
Are you going to make sure the "backup" will now be in another room or at least several racks away?
Why not if the software could recover once things are back to normal? Obviously, you wouldn't do that for critical real time applications like a VoIP server, but for something like a web server, I don't see why the software couldn't be designed to handle it gracefully.
What on earth makes you think that's a wooden roof?
What on earth makes you think that's a wooden roof?
I see a (modified) bitumen roof with wood fascia. A "fire suppression system" does nothing if that lights up.
It's common problem in building fires here, the roof and trusses (which are above all the sprinklers) can start burning and the fire crawls along the roof. Firefighters have to dump water despite the interior not being on fire at all.
I would think buildings in the UK have similar issues, with flat tar roofs?
What on earth makes you think that's a wooden roof?
I see a (modified) bitumen roof with wood fascia. A "fire suppression system" does nothing if that lights up.
It's common problem in building fires here, the roof and trusses (which are above all the sprinklers) can start burning and the fire crawls along the roof. Firefighters have to dump water despite the interior not being on fire at all.
I would think buildings in the UK have similar issues, with flat tar roofs?
I see a structure which will have steel trusses. The deck could be anything up to and including pre-cast concrete panels.
What on earth makes you think that's a wooden roof?
I see a (modified) bitumen roof with wood fascia. A "fire suppression system" does nothing if that lights up.
It's common problem in building fires here, the roof and trusses (which are above all the sprinklers) can start burning and the fire crawls along the roof. Firefighters have to dump water despite the interior not being on fire at all.
I would think buildings in the UK have similar issues, with flat tar roofs?
That's a great idea. One issue I can see for a hosting company is that they allow their customers to manage/reinstall to OS and apps. It would be difficult to enforce the installation of power-management software. It would be great if servers had a (let's say) 5 volt input, and when it dropped to below 1 volt, the BIOS would throttle the CPU down. Then you "just" run a 5 volt line run off of non-UPS, non-generator mains to each server and you're golden.I have hacked some PCs to do just that by using a small MOSFET to pull the PROCHOT line to ground.That probably wouldn't work. If you're running near your CPU provision, you can enter a thing called "load hysteresis" which may be irrecoverable. This is where your load average goes above the total capacity and the CPUs can never catch up with the workload. It requires adding much much more capacity than you had to start with before you can being the demand you had originally. Either that or breaking a huge chunk of your incoming load to recover.That doesn't sound like something that should happen with a robustly designed service, wouldn't that mean a hacker who wants to take it down can just DDoS it for a short time and let queue overflow continue it for much longer than the initial attack?
What on earth makes you think that's a wooden roof?
I see a (modified) bitumen roof with wood fascia. A "fire suppression system" does nothing if that lights up.
It's common problem in building fires here, the roof and trusses (which are above all the sprinklers) can start burning and the fire crawls along the roof. Firefighters have to dump water despite the interior not being on fire at all.
I would think buildings in the UK have similar issues, with flat tar roofs?Wood roofs are typical on that sort of building, I don't recall the name they call buildings of that style but the walls are cast in place reinforced concrete with wooden beams running across, supporting a plywood roof that is covered in a weatherproof outer layer. All three of the light industrial complexes my friends' shop has been been built in that way.
What on earth makes you think that's a wooden roof?
I see a (modified) bitumen roof with wood fascia. A "fire suppression system" does nothing if that lights up.
It's common problem in building fires here, the roof and trusses (which are above all the sprinklers) can start burning and the fire crawls along the roof. Firefighters have to dump water despite the interior not being on fire at all.
I would think buildings in the UK have similar issues, with flat tar roofs?Wood roofs are typical on that sort of building, I don't recall the name they call buildings of that style but the walls are cast in place reinforced concrete with wooden beams running across, supporting a plywood roof that is covered in a weatherproof outer layer. All three of the light industrial complexes my friends' shop has been been built in that way.Often done as tilt-up construction. Floor slab is poured. After it hardens, forms for wall sections are put on the floor, and the wall section concrete is poured. After wall sections are hard, they are hoisted into place with a crane. Has been most popular in the U.S., Australia and NZ. Wikipedia describes it pretty well.
Mike in California