This past evening, just as I was retiring to bed in the midst of a wild thunderstorm, my alarms went off telling me that the office was on battery backup—a power outage: an IT person’s worst nightmare.
The office lost power at 12:05am, and it came back up at exactly 4:20am. I know because I was here the whole time, waiting for power to be restored. My UPS systems kept our servers up long enough for me to be able to drive to the office and shut them down cleanly (what more can you ask, really?). With the reduced load, our network switches and email router stayed up for almost 3 hours on battery power.
Anyhow, I have just completed starting up all the servers and checking to make sure things are running smooth. I predict a nap in the very near future…