by Bill Brown, P.E. & Mark Kozlowski

Reliability principles indicate that, due to component degradation, no power system can operate 100% of the time indefinitely. Back up and recovery procedures are designed to save the critical load in an emergency condition. The key to incident recovery is in the ability to quickly understand what went wrong and implement corrective actions. New power monitoring systems can re-construct the sequence of events such as circuit breaker tripping, static switch transfer, etc., down to 1 ms resolution. This paper discusses this technology and the necessity of its application to modern data centers.