Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

One of the benefits of launching your applications in the cloud is the ability to work on any project from any location. One of the detriments to launching in the cloud is that data center power can and does fail. While you hope redundancy is in place to protect your information and keep you online, proper power protection could help to prevent the outage in the first place.

This concept took higher priority when Equinix (News - Alert) experienced a power outage within one of its data centers last Friday morning. According to this DatacenterDynamics report, multiple customers were affected, including Zoho (News - Alert), a provider of online business applications.

Dealing with the power outage, Zoho posted an update on its blog, announcing to readers that all services were down due to the outage and restoring service would realistically take several hours. The company did assure customers that some services could be restored sooner once databases were in sync.

For its part, Equinix did confirm the power outage within its SV4 data center in Sunnyvale, but did not specify if the outage was a result of a failure to provide power protection or a failure in redundancy. The company merely expressed apologies and then confirmed that power had remained stable. At that time, engineers were still investigating the root cause.

Zoho reported the power outage around 8:45 a.m. PST on Friday, with power restored to some services by 9:30 a.m. A company-released update at 4:50 that afternoon stated that work was still being done on restoring some services.

This situation highlights the importance of power protection in every data center and for every cloud-based provider. Both Equinix and Zoho must have contingency plans in place to assure continuous service for customers in the event of a power failure.

Minuteman UPS/Para Systems (News - Alert) is one company dedicated to providing power protection for its companies. Recently, Minuteman sat down with TMCnet to discuss the top three misconceptions surrounding power protection. The first is that UPSs and power protection products are too expensive.

“The problem with this thinking is that no matter the price, the up-front cost of power protection is usually recovered the first time a problem occurs,” Duston Nixon, marketing communications specialist for Minuteman, told TMCnet. “When presented with the possibility of complete power failure, most business owners and administrators will agree that a few hundred or even thousand dollars is a worthwhile insurance policy.”