We had a power outage in our area today, taking out our office… (following on from yesterday’s outage in Marylebone that took out Level3 in the UK - in the USA MySpace was also taken out by the heat - this is a little concerning!).

One fascinating thing though - the temperature graphs on our servers show a rapid rise from the stable air-con’d temperature leading up to the outage. This would imply that there was a localised temperature increase in the area that all the local air-con units would be trying to deal with, leading to a spike in consumption, causing the outage….

So, now, if we were to gets feed of all the servers globally into a central DB, we’d have temperature data… then tie it to google maps with a temp scale on each data centre/city (normalising out the mean temp. maintained by the co-lo’s).