Con Ed Says NYC Datacenters Should Get Power Saturday

Nerval's Lobster writes "The local utility serving most of the New York City area, Con Edison, reported that it should begin supplying utility power to midtown and lower Manhattan by Saturday evening, returning the island's data centers and citizens to some semblance of normalcy. In the past few days, data center managers have been forced to add fuel logistics to their list of responsibilities, as most Manhattan data centers have been subsisting on generator power. That should come to an end, for the most part, when utility power is restored. In a possibly worrying note, Verizon warned late on Nov. 1 that its services to business customers could be impacted due to lack of fuel."

Comments

Fuel logistics

[hawguy]

In the past few days, data center managers have been forced to add fuel logistics to their list of responsibilities, as most Manhattan data centers have been subsisting on generator power.

Any datacenter manager that doesn't already have fuel logistics in their disaster plan is in the wrong line of work. Few inner city datacenters have a week or more of fuel on-site - most have only days of fuel, and they count on fuel contracts from suppliers to keep them running. And the supplier may not be able to honor the contract in a disaster.

Suburban and rural datacenters have the space (and less conflict with fire codes since the fuel is not stored in or near an office building) to keep weeks of fuel on hand. The last datacenter that I colocated in had 2 weeks of fuel on-site, and had another week of fuel in a trailer that can be trucked in from their other facility 60 miles away if the roads are passable. They had a spare generator that can be trucked in from that other facility as well. (and this facility could send fuel and a generator to that facility if needed)

Re:Fuel logistics

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but you can't legally use the fuel that's meant for the data center in your truck to get it there. We did that after Hugo hit the SC coast in Sept 1989 and got caught. The generator fuel has dye in it that will stain the fuel filter. It took nearly six months and several tens of thousands in legal fees to get our truck back. Meanwhile, the servers in our data center in Goose Creek, SC ran out of fuel and nearly put the company out of business. There were dozens of other trucks that got caught at the weight stations over the next few years that also used fuel not meant for use on the road that were also fined and/or confiscated. My father-in-law owns a towing company so they got a lot of towing and storage business from that. Don't underestimate the US government's desire to screw over the little guy and their desire to put companies out of business.