Last year, about this time, I asked if there was any interest in sharing power quality data. Whether it is Northern Virginia, or Silicon Valley, a lot of us drink from the same power pond. Its not so much a competitive matter, as bad power will make all of us sick. Internally we all have UPSes, generators, flywheels, etc. but we all get utility power from the same grid. Most of us collect a lot of data with power quality meters from our point of view of the utility grid. But since none of us share information, none of us really knows what the whole picture looks like. A few miles a way the major regional power outage may show up us just a blip in the data. And unless you were looking specifically for it, you might not have noticed. Nevertheless, the additional data might help with the analysis, if you knew who to ask to get it. AOL has one of the best designed, built and operated data centers in the world. Everyone I know who has ever seen it has been very impressed. It would take a remarkable event to affect AOL's operation. But we are always building based on the last earthquake, or the last hurricane or the last power problem. So we learn every time the extraordinary happens. Other data centers may use a very similar power design, so the extraordinary is very much of interest. Who knows, another data center might have already had the similar problem and found a fix.
This is of course the extremely low-end of power quality data gathering, but I've thrown up the scripts I use with apcupsd and rrdtool to grab the power quality info from an APC smart-UPS in the San Diego, CA, US area. They're at http://www.foxfire.net/volts/; my graphs are also up there. If nothing else, this may be an easy way to 'webify' a subset of the data to facilitate sharing. (note, I don't consider 120+/-5V to be much of an issue...but the fluctuations are interesting.) They're also only as accurate as whatever the APC uses to gather its data. But it works. I don't have the time to support the scripts, unfortunately (mails asking for help with them will be ignored), but they're simple enough that you should be able to figure them out with access to the RRDtool documentation and the README I've stuck in the package. Egregious errors I've made will, of course, be fixed if someone tells me about them. }:> If anyone is particularly interested I could start a link farm of other power quality graphs such as these on this set of pages; I'm not sure how much of that would be considered 'proprietary data', though. -Sven On Thu, Apr 05, 2001 at 08:33:23PM -0700, Sean Donelan put this into my mailbox:
Most of us collect a lot of data with power quality meters from our point of view of the utility grid. But since none of us share information, none of us really knows what the whole picture looks like. A few miles a way the major regional power outage may show up us just a blip in the data. And unless you were looking specifically for it, you might not have noticed. Nevertheless, the additional data might help with the analysis, if you knew who to ask to get it.
-- Dalvenjah FoxFire (aka Sven Nielsen) "It brought me a Mr. Potato Head, Founder, the DALnet IRC Network Scully. It knew that I wanted a Mr. Potato Head!" e-mail: dalvenjah@dal.net WWW: http://www.dal.net/~dalvenjah/ whois: SN90 Try DALnet! http://www.dal.net/
participants (2)
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Sean Donelan -
Sven Nielsen