Power cuts: What to do before the lights go out (and after)

A power outage can cause major disruption. Steve Cassidy looks at how to plan ahead-and how to cope with the aftermath

It’s nearly 50 years since the UK last suffered from sustained power blackouts; back then, very few businesses had computer equipment of any kind to worry about. Now, for a variety of reasons, the nation faces a potential energy shortage, and it’s been suggested that planned outages – perhaps from 4pm to 7pm on the coldest winter weekdays – could be necessary to manage the limited supply.

Of course, it’s far from certain that things will come to that. Even so, the mere possibility of wide-ranging power cuts should make IT managers take notice. For decades we’ve been paying lip service to ideas of power management and resilience. Now it’s time to get serious about the prospect of spending at least a few hours with no electricity.

Down together, up in turns 

Perhaps because outages are so rare, there’s a lot of misapprehension and misinformation out there concerning what happens to your computers and servers when the power abruptly goes out. To be fair, there’s an observational element to this: at some point, I’m sure every professional has yanked power leads out, disconnected network storage, bashed loose RAM and so forth. Experience tells us that an unplanned shutdown (or crash) doesn’t inevitably lead to disastrous data loss.