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The “shocking” cost of downtime due to power outages

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According to a 2005 whitepaper by APC (PDF Link), manufacturers of uninterruptable power supplies (UPS’s) and power conversion equipment:

“A recent study in the USA has shown that industrial and digital business firms are losing $45.7 billion per year due to power interruptions1. Across all business sectors, an estimated $104 billion to $164 billion is lost due to interruptions with another $15 billion to $24 billion due to all other power quality problems. … Loss of processing in a large financial corporation can cost thousands of unrecoverable dollars per minute of downtime, as well as many hours of recovery time to follow. Program and data corruption caused by a power interruption can create problems for software recovery operations that may take weeks to resolve.”

When looking at national figures, it’s easy to say “that’ll never happen to me.” Let me bring this a little closer to home:

• If your 24-hour courier business relies on a dedicated server with software to dispatch your drivers, what happens when you have a power outage that last several hours?
• If your e-commerce site is down for even an hour, how much does that translate to in lost revenue?
• How do you calculate the value of the lost opportunities when a storm knocks out power to your server room and your sales force can’t access your pricey CRM application? (Remember the storms this summer?)

The average office battery backup lasts a half hour or less. Power outages due to storm damage can take hours to days before power is restored. Fortunately, the recent ice storms didn’t hit the Chicago area as badly as they did Oklahoma City, where:

“About 468,000 homes and business still had no power Wednesday in Oklahoma, suffering its worst power outage on record. That was down from a peak of some 618,000 customers Tuesday, but utility officials said it could be a week to 10 days before power is fully restored.”

To avoid having your business go down in a similar incident — summer or winter — host your servers in a fully-redundant data center like XNet’s Critical Computing Facility™ with backup generator power and full network redundancy. To arrange a tour or for questions on services and pricing, contact us via the web or phone at 630.983.6064.