An Uninterruptible Power Supply monitors and regulates the external power feeds to a data center. It acts as a buffer, protecting servers from power dips and surges, and draws power from batteries - and, if necessary, diesel generators - the moment a feed is interrupted.

Moving down the hall from their UPS monitoring equipment are batteries that will take over the instant a power interruption occurs. HostIndex.com was told that they were checked daily for corrosion or leakage, and then put under load once a month. In most cases the batteries would need to sustain facility operations independently for only 5-15 seconds before our three diesel generators take over - these ones hold enough power to sustain server operations for 16 hours, should a massive power outage occur.

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Once a UPS system has detected a power loss and instantaneously compensated by activating back-up systems, a data center's generators begin feeding power to the batteries within a matter of seconds. The generators produce enough electricity to maintain server operations and climate control systems for differing amounts of time depending on their capacity.

This concludes our data center tour. We'd like to thank Tri Star Web and Interliant for their assistance.