Comment by charwalker
5 years ago
For outages the generatos are great but I'm not sure how they assist with brownouts unless they can start instantly or are constantly running to provide a buffer.
Short term they'd help but an instantaneous or unexpected massive traffic/CPU usage/user surge might pop too fast for the generators to start and kick in properly. Also, it might not be good for those big generators to start and stop over and over vs bringing infra back online in waves to limit spikes.
For outages the generatos are great but I'm not sure how they assist with brownouts unless they can start instantly
If the generators will help in an outage, why wouldn't they help in a brownout? You'd transition to generator when the voltage and/or frequency is outside of spec.
You'd typically have some short-term power protection to keep your datacenter running until the generators start.
I was skeptical about a datacenter that had less than 60 seconds of flywheel energy storage. But the data center manager said that if the generator doesn't start within 30 seconds, you're not going to get it started in an hour so having a huge battery stack that can power the datacenter for 15 minutes isn't going to help much.
Generators do usually start up very quickly. Under a minute.
I guess a DC would have UPS/battery power on hand to cover an instantaneous brown out. Then the generators could be on and restoring battery power while running the DC.