Digital Realty Facilities Stay Online During Power Outages In San Francisco & New York

On April 21, 2017, the cities of San Francisco and New York experienced massive power outages that halted morning commutes and disrupted businesses for hours. Both outages were reportedly caused by equipment failures, but neither could be remedied in time to prevent thousands from being late to work, or in some cases giving up on their commute entirely.

Though the timing of the outages is reported to be purely coincidental, the chaotic scenes in each of the cities looked very similar. In San Francisco, an estimated 90,000 were impacted. Traffic signals went dark and cars were backed up in the streets as far as the eye could see. Schools operated under blackout procedures and hospitals relied on backup generators. In New York, people were trapped in subways and elevators.

The impact of a lengthy, widespread outage on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York cannot be overstated. In a time when connectivity is essential to almost every aspect of business and the slightest amount of downtime can cause significant detriment to the daily operations of organizations large and small, the recent power outages display the importance of keeping your critical infrastructure in the most secure, reliable, and redundant facilities available.

Although unfortunate for many, throughout these events, we are proud to say that Digital Realty’s San Francisco and New York data center facilities remained online and experienced zero downtime. Recently, Digital Realty announced its remarkable record of 10 years of ‘5 nines’ of uptime. Redundancy, along with our people, is an essential part of that prolonged success.

In conversation, redundancy is unnecessary and annoying. In data center operations, it is a critical part of providing uptime. Redundancy levels in data centers indicate how quickly critical system components can be duplicated on a regular basis in order to make the system more secure and to support the constant availability of that system. A big part of this is found in knowing what workloads require what level of redundancy.

At Digital Realty, we take pride in the fact that, even in situations where power has been lost as occurred recently in San Francisco and New York, our clients’ businesses continued to operate in our facilities. That’s because we’ve made it a priority for our electrical and cooling systems to be fully redundant, giving you peace of mind when it comes to your data center operations.

Want to learn more about Digital Realty’s global footprint of data centers? View a list of our facilities by location, here. Or click here to learn more about how Digital Realty’s data center solutions can help you reach your business goals.