Failed transfer to backup power reported to shut down Dallas data centre used by Availity

What happened

During the February 2021 winter storm power emergency in Texas, a data centre in Dallas used by Availity, a Florida-based provider of data services to health care providers and health plans, was reported to have been offline for about 11 hours on a Monday in February 2021. The date of 15 February 2021 is inferred from the reporting and has not been confirmed. Availity said its provider attempted to transfer power from the primary system to the backup system to avoid an interruption from the utility outage, and that the transfer failed and caused an abrupt shutdown of its systems.

The data centre operator is not named in the source. The Data Center Frontier article reported that other Texas data centre operators were running on generator power during the same emergency. This account comes from Availity and has not been independently confirmed.

Contributing factors

The transfer was attempted to avoid an interruption from a utility supply outage during the statewide grid emergency. Availity said the transfer from primary to backup power failed. The source does not state why the transfer failed.

Lessons learned

1. Test automatic and manual transfer sequences between utility and backup power under load at regular intervals, not only at commissioning.
2. Plan for transfer failure during regional grid emergencies, when utility outages and backup demand coincide, and define a manual fallback that can be used quickly.
3. Customers relying on a single facility should ask providers how transfers are tested and what failover arrangements exist.

More lessons on outages, backup supply and restoration, from every incident on the register.

Source

datacenterfrontier.com