Is it time for more off-grid options for data centers?
Massive thunderstorms knocked out Amazon’s web services on Friday night and the cloud giant was still struggling to get service back up on Saturday, affecting major AWS customers like Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest. To me the news raises the question: is it time for the huge data center operators to more seriously investigate off-grid options? It’s not as crazy as it sounds, and some Internet players already are experimenting with generating their own power onsite for parts of their data centers and using the grid partly as back up power. Last week eBay announced that for an extension of its data center in Utah, it plans to power that new capacity with 30 fuel cells from Bloom Energy, making that section of the data center grid independent.
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