Winter Storm Jonas pounded the east coast this past weekend with up to three feet of snow and 60-80 mile per hour winds. Widespread power outages affected a large swath of the area with hundreds of thousands impacted in North Carolina and the mid-Atlantic, including numerous data centers. Storms like these are why we sweat the details in designing, constructing and operating the most resilient enterprise data centers.

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As with Hurricanes Sandy and Irene, Sentinel Data Centers maintained utility service throughout the storm at each of its North Carolina and New Jersey facilities.

Designing and constructing dedicated, 2N transmission voltage substations takes years of planning, engineering and coordination with local utilities. The end result, however, is vastly improved resiliency. Unlike typical distribution voltages utilized by most data centers, high voltage service is inherently more reliable, functioning as a utility’s main “highway” through which it delivers power to the distribution lines that feed each local street on which we work and live.

“At the end of the day, it’s all about uptime and sweating the details that provide it.”

Utility service design and delivery is a dense and complicated subject. But decisions we make have consequences, and the sum total of numerous decisions around design, construction and operation, is ultimately what inform a data center’s resiliency. At the end of the day, it’s all about uptime and sweating the details that provide it.