PernixData chap: We are to storage as Alfred Nobel was to dynamite

Power

How often are Pernix systems deployed with dedicated UPSs for each one? Even distributing writes across multiple hosts doesn't protect you if the power goes out. Of course most data centers have redundant power but in rare cases that is not sufficient enough which is why RAID controllers often have batteries on them, and larger storage systems (such as HP 3PAR) have larger batteries in them to de-stage the contents of data cache to a local SSD/disk in the controller(not part of the attached storage which has lost power), and since there are two copies of the data to be written in cache, two copies are written to local disk (in the event one of those disks fails, I've had two local disks in my oldest 3PAR fail in the past 3 years at different times) so the system can remain w/o power indefinitely without risk of data loss.

I remember one data center outage in Seattle (fortunately I had not been a customer of that facility in 3+ years at that point) where they had a fire in the power room and knocked the facility offline for roughly 40 hours. They had the facility running on generator trucks for several months while they repaired it. Obviously people with storage systems that had batteries keeping their memory from shutting down were probably worried, not knowing when power might be restored. And no, many of them did not have any kind of disaster plan including Microsoft's own "Bing Travel" which was down the whole time too. I remember being told some NetApp systems took upwards of 12+ hours to restart doing file system checks or something.

So assume you lose power to all of your racks at the same time what sort of setup does Pernix have to protect against this? Many data centers don't allow the use of a regular UPS(fire code), or if they do perhaps require integration with EPO. Some IBM blogger told me an interesting bit that in most cases fire code will allow a UPS as long as it doesn't run for more than a few minutes or something(there is a hard limit on runtime).

From what I recall Pernix operates on "bog standard" hardware which means they'd need enough power for the entire server to run long enough to dump the contents of (unwritten) memory to persistent storage.

I am kind of surprised the Pernix people didn't call out specifically their response to power issues in this article. Or maybe their use of memory is limited to read operations only, and operates as a write through cache to SSD, in which case no need to preserve it. For me that wouldn't help much as my workload is 90%+ write.