PG&E Planned Power Outage in Sacramento

[Mirassou]

Sorry to be the buzzkill to the generator thing but... whats the use in powering a data centre if theres no power beyond it? Cant reach the web if the surrounding exchanges are powered down.

Well if it does affect the data centre hopefully it wont be for too long

"I can only speak for the general region I work at, but every single datacenter & node across the entire province are equipped with backup power reserves in the event of a large scale power outage. Literally everything else could go down but networking access would be uninterrupted. Every minute of downtime costs thousands of dollars lost in profit, so my datacenter has three separate backup power systems installed in case even one of the Redundant systems fails." - my BF.

Could be different for Cali, but considering that's smack dab in the middle of silicone/tech valley, I wouldn't be surprised if the apocalypse could happen and networking would be uninterrupted there. Not to mention for the game to be unconnectable, literally every single route into Sacremento would have to be shutdown, something that even if a few nodes fail, is something insanely unlikely. As long as one active route to sacremento exists, connection will be possible, just maybe slightly higher ping.

EDIT: also from the article Hyomin linked - "The planned shutoff appears to spare most of Silicon Valley’s big tech operations."

Sounds like it won't be a problem, hopefully that's the case ...

[Dsherman]

Almost all of Sacramento County gets its electric power from Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and NOT PG&E.

This includes the building where the FFXIV servers for NA are housed.

I think that building is about 10-15 miles from where I live (which is also in Sacramento County).

They will not need generators for this outage, but I'm pretty sure they do have them enough to keep everything going.

[Mirassou]

Almost all of Sacramento County gets its electric power from Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and NOT PG&E.

This includes the building where the FFXIV servers for NA are housed.

I think that building is about 10-15 miles from where I live (which is also in Sacramento County).

They will not need generators for this outage, but I'm pretty sure they do have them enough to keep everything going.

Good to know!!! Thank you

[Xiomara]

Former Data Center engineer here! The game will remain online and available. The servers are hosted in one of the NTT's Sacramento DCs, which has multiple redundant diesel generators which will power all the UPSs that the servers are connected to. This is Data Center 101 stuff. As for network connectivity, all major backbones have similar generators in their own data centers so there will be no issue there.

[Mistyregions]

You were saying?

If you don't think diesel can power up computers, how do you think cruise ships propel themselves?

Those cats burn like 270+ gallons a hour at maximum load. You know how expensive that is to run those engines?

[MariaArvana]

Those cats burn like 270+ gallons a hour at maximum load. You know how expensive that is to run those engines?

You know how much money a datacenter loses per hour if those things aren't running to keep their services active? Way more than the cost of those cats.

[Arthrun]

Almost all of Sacramento County gets its electric power from Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and NOT PG&E.

This includes the building where the FFXIV servers for NA are housed.

I think that building is about 10-15 miles from where I live (which is also in Sacramento County).

They will not need generators for this outage, but I'm pretty sure they do have them enough to keep everything going.

=3

Gunthers? or Vic's? or Leatherby’s?

[Mihana]

I think it's safe to say if there IS server downtime due to losing power SE will put up a notice for US players. They've done so before when their ISP had to do their own maintenance so unless we see something mentioning it don't worry.

[Catwho]

Sorry to be the buzzkill to the generator thing but... whats the use in powering a data centre if theres no power beyond it? Cant reach the web if the surrounding exchanges are powered down.

Well if it does affect the data centre hopefully it wont be for too long

ISPs will have backup power too. Whenever the power around here goes down, the battery backup on my cable modem and router picks right up, and we don't lose internet connection. Last outage where we didn't lose connection at all was two weeks ago, and it was 400+ customers in the area. Our cable lines are buried, so the only way we get cut is if someone accidentally slices a line during construction. Power outage didn't affect it at all.

I highly recommend getting a small uninterruptible power supply for your modem and router, if for no other reason than power blips won't cause your modem to take five minutes to reset.

[Hyperia]

I used to work at a power plant a long time ago and at the time we had 3 diesel/heavy fuel generators generating 5 megawatt each (if I remember correctly) doubt a datacenter would need that much. So it's definitely possible.
Only issue perhaps is the size of them and the noise they make.

One of the DCs I have worked with had 9MW in 3 generators, 2 natural gas and 1 diesel generator. They only needed 6MW but the 3rd generator was for redundancy. When it comes to big diesel engines though, here is one that can power a small city. This is no Photoshop job, this is a real engine:


https://www.zmescience.com/science/b...-engine-world/