I tried to pull up the blackout plan the other day and was having trouble finding the PDF's again. Someone posted that their ward is not receiving blackouts, which makes sense if you were to pull up a map of the area around their building. It is a highly commercialized area, and there is both a Hospital and Police station within a coupl blocks of their building. There are several more hospitals close by as well--3 within just a few miles of their building, as well as about 5 or 6 university campuses. A big Metropolitan Goverment Office building is within about 5 blocks or so as well, and I heard it is a big corridor for their mass transit system nearby as well.

In short, that section of the grid is under heavy strain normally, and SE is in a 23 story building that houses 4 divisions of their entire operation (including the Taito Corporation division). So it kind of stands to reason that they would want to do their part to conserve power. Also, as mentioned in the Producer's Letter in the FFXIV forum (may have been on Lodestone, not sure), they have a large number of international employees. A lot of employees left the area due to concerns expressed by their respective counselates as well as friends/family, so they also quickly found themselves short staffed.

The exact particulars of their server infrastructure is unkown, but the general concept is at least 1 server per world (24, +1 test server), in addition to 4 DNS servers, a 2 server storage rack housing their internal message services as well as at least one data storage rack to house their data, and additional servers for the POL service, Lobby servers, and the data storage units for the FFXI characters themselves. It is safe to assume it could be 30, as many as 40 servers in addition to several racks of disk arrays for data storage.

Raist