DVL Group Blog with Helpful Information on Running Your Data Center

Is your organization trained on the new NFPA 70E requirements?

by Mike Rinaldi on 9/24/12 3:30 PM

New NFPA Electrical Safety Rules Mean Changes for Your Data Center

A service professional is working on a piece of electrical equipment. Hes 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 couldnt 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.

> Read Full Article

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?

Topics: Emerson Network Power, data center infrastructure, Data Center, data center design, data center infrastructure management, robust data center, electrical distribution, reduce downtime, data center outages, critical air conditioning

Do You Control Your Data Center or Is It Controlling You?

by Mike Rinaldi on 8/15/12 11:55 AM

Ever have one of those days which turn into weeks, where nothing seems to be going your way? Your boss is constantly nagging you to reduce the power usage in your data center in an effort to curb costs; a cable becomes loose somewhere (and it takes you hours to figure out where it is); a server goes down yet again, causing the network to crash. And just when you thought things were starting to go right a power failure in the whole region has your data center shutting down for days. In this post, I am going to probe the concept of whether your data center is controlling you, rather than the other way around.

HOW DO YOU CONTROL YOUR DATA CENTER?

-Pursuit of Efficiency

-Gaps in the Market

-Combining the Software with the Hardware

-Total Control of the Data Center

>> Read more here

Data Center Knowledge

The Question Remains: Do you prefer hot aisle or cold aisle containment?

data center

Topics: data center infrastructure, Data Center, Green IT, data center design, kW per rack, data center energy, data center infrastructure management, Containment, reduce downtime

Twitter: Data center problems caused outage

by Mike Rinaldi on 7/27/12 3:42 PM

By CASSANDRA VINOGRAD, The Associated Press

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.

Is your data center prepared for an outage?

twitter down

Topics: data center infrastructure, reduce cost, Data Center, data center design, data center energy, robust data center, reduce downtime, data center outages

Cloud Burst - Data Center Outages

by Mike Rinaldi on 7/11/12 10:32 AM

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.

> Read full article here now

Rich Miller [Data Center Knowledge]

Protect Your Business With Strategeic Account Services

Rely On Only The Most Qualified Technicians For Circuit Breaker Testing

> Request Circuit Breaker Test Information

Your circuit breaker testing is performed by field technicians ensuring ongoing education and adherence to strict standards in safety and electrical testing knowledge.

Topics: data center infrastructure, Data Center, data center design, cloud computing, data center infrastructure management, electrical distribution, reduce downtime, data center outages, cloud strategy

Why Test Your Circuit Breakers? Because They Fail

by Mike Rinaldi on 6/21/12 1:53 PM

Amazon Traces Cloud Outage To Faulty Breaker

Improperly configured breaker opened and brought down portion of cloud

[Data Center Dynamics]

Amazon Web Services has released details about the root cause of the outage of one of its public-cloud’s availability zones that started in the evening on 14 June and lasted until next morning, US Pacific time.

In a note posted on the cloud’s status dashboard, the company said the outage was caused by a cable fault in the power distribution system of the electric utility that served the data center hosting the US-East-1 region of the cloud in northern Virginia.

The entire facility was switched over to back-up generator power, but one of the generators overheated and powered off because of a defective cooling fan. The virtual-machine instances and virtual-storage volumes that were powered by this generator were transferred to a secondary back-up power system, provided by a separate power-distribution circuit that has its own backup generator capacity.

But, one of the breakers on this backup circuit was configured incorrectly and opened as soon as the load was transferred to the circuit. The breaker was set up to open at too low a power threshold.

“After this circuit breaker opened … the affected instances and volumes were left without primary, back-up, or secondary back-up power,” Amazon’s note read.

> Read the full article" target="_blank"> >> Read the full article

A survey by Hartford Insurance Company found that air circuit breakers represent 19.5% of electrical power system failures. Test results on circuit breakers by NETA (InterNational Electrical Testing Association) firms show over a 15% failure rate. Defective circuit breakers can allow extensive damage, personal injury, or make an outage more widespread when a fault occurs. They can also trip when they shouldn’t, causing expensive downtime.

> Request Circuit Breaker Test Information

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Topics: data center infrastructure, reduce cost, Data Center, data center design, cloud computing, data center infrastructure management, robust data center, electrical distribution, reduce downtime, data center outages, cloud strategy

Is your organization trained on the new NFPA 70E requirements?

New NFPA Electrical Safety Rules Mean Changes for Your Data Center

Do You Control Your Data Center or Is It Controlling You?

Twitter: Data center problems caused outage

Cloud Burst - Data Center Outages

Muliple Generator Failures Cause 2nd Amazon Outage

Why Test Your Circuit Breakers? Because They Fail

Amazon Traces Cloud Outage To Faulty Breaker

Improperly configured breaker opened and brought down portion of cloud

Subscribe to Our Blog

Recent Posts

Posts by Tag

DVL is Proud to be 100% Employee Owned