New NFPA Electrical Safety Rules Mean Changes for Your Data Center

A service professional is working on a piece of electrical equipment. He’s done it hundreds of times before, but in a moment of carelessness or by total accident, an arc flash occurs. Most of us think this couldn’t happen to us. The truth is that electrocutions are the fourth leading cause of traumatic occupational fatalities, and according to the American Society of Safety Engineers, more than 3,600 workers suffer disabling electrical contact injuries annually.

Check out the Is Your Data Center Prepared for an Outage? whitepaper

To help prevent electrical injuries and deaths, the new 2012 version of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 70E: Standard for Electrical Safety in the Workplace makes important changes in the areas of safety, maintenance and training.

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Proper gear and procedures are critical when working with energized electrical equipment. Employees working on electrical equipment without adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) risk serious injury or death when an electrical arc occurs.

Is your organization trained on NFPA 70E requirements?

Separating the hot and cold air in a data center is one of the keys to improving energy efficiency.  Containment systems don't have to be fancy or expensive.  Containment systems have been in use at least since 2004, but there's an ongoing debate about whether it is best to contain the hot aisle or cold aisle.  

Do you use containment in your data center?  If so, do you contain the hot aisle or cold aisle?"

LONDON (AP) — Twitter blamed systems failures — not a crush of traffic around the Olympic games — for an outage on Thursday that saw people around the world experience problems accessing the micro blogging site for more than an hour.

The San Francisco-based company said the outage was caused by a "noteworthy" double failure in its data centers. When one system fails, a parallel one is meant to take over, but two systems coincidentally stopped working at around the same time, Twitter said.

"I wish I could say that today's outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug," Mazen Rawashdeh, VP of engineering, said in a statement apologizing to users. "Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy."

He apologized for giving its users "zilch" instead of the service, saying the company is "investing aggressively" in its systems to avoid a repeat situation.

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Is your data center prepared for an outage?

NEW YORK, Jul 11, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Uptime Institute, a division of The 451 Group, today announced the complete results of its second annual data center industry survey. The survey was developed to collect data on an annual basis around Digital Infrastructure deployment trends, procurement plans, measurement and standards practices, and other topics that impact the mission-critical data center industry.

"Among many interesting upward trends, we continue to see an increase in data center budgets, which is a pleasant surprise as many budgets in the IT sector are on the decline," said Matt Stansberry, Uptime Institute Director of Content and Publications. "Our survey, which has already piqued industry recognition in its early stages, is a true picture of where the industry is headed as our sample base represents many of the top data center owners and operators across the globe."

Click here to view the key findings of the survey

The 2012 survey represents responses from more than 2,000 owners, operators, vendors, consultants and users from around the world. The survey report focuses on the 1,100 owners and operators from this pool. Respondents were largely represented by the financial industry, technology service providers, manufacturing and government agencies. Over 75% manage more than one data center, with North America being the best-represented region.

Uptime Institute’s complete survey report drills down on many of the data points, carving out segments by company size, geography and vertical industry. It includes Uptime Institute’s expert analysis on Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) adoption, equipment manufacturer market share, energy saving strategies for data center operators, and much more. Complimentary access to the full report is available for download with registration: http://uptimeinstitute.com/2012-survey-results.

Muliple Generator Failures Cause 2nd Amazon Outage

Amazon Web Services says that the repeated failure of multiple generators in a single data center caused last Friday night’s power outage, which led to downtime for Netflix, Instagram and many other popular web sites. The generators in this facility failed to operate properly during two utility outages over a short period Friday evening when the site lost utility power, depleting the emergency power in the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems.

Amazon said the data center outage affected a small percentage of its operations, but was exacerbated by problems with systems that allow customers to spread workloads across multiple data centers. The company apologized for the outage and outlined the steps it will take to address the problems and prevent a recurrence.