The company this pilot fish works for is located in a big industrial park, and when it’s time to add a redundant data center, management knows just where it should go.

“They put it next door to the primary data center,” sighs fish. “No problem, we were assured, there’s a big diesel generator for both data centers that will automatically kick in should power fail.”

And of course it does fail when a summer thunderstorm knocks out power. Both data centers switch immediately to battery power until the big new generator takes over.

It never does. Operations staffers just manage to complete an orderly shutdown of the servers before the UPS batteries die.

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