The key ingredient to keeping all those servers up and running obviously is power delivery. The TeleCity datacenter we visited has up to 4Megawatt of power coming into the facility from the power grid whereas there’s two diesel power generators with a total capacity of 3.7Megawatt available that have enough diesel fuel to last for 24 hours. There’s also a no-break battery backup, or rather UPS, that’ll bridge the gap between the power grid going offline and the diesel-generators starting up. Naturally these installations are tested on a regular basis to make sure that when push comes to shove, a failure of the power grid, things indeed go as planned and all of the servers keep on running.



Fig 1. A look at the power switchboard at the TeleCity datacenter in Amsterdam South-East.



Fig 2. A look into the battery room, many lead-acid batteries are combined to power the UPS.