Texas Providers Manage Rolling Blackouts

Record-setting spring heat in Texas prompted utilities around to implement rolling blackouts Monday, testing the backup systems for some of the state's many large data centers. Texas is home to several of the world's biggest dedicated server and managed hosting providers, including EV1Servers and Vericenter in Houston, The Planet in Dallas, and Rackspace in San Antonio. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the organization that runs the state's energy grid, issued an emergency call to power companies as temperatures surpassed 90 degrees, cutting off electricity to thousands of Texans with the rolling blackouts that affected homes and businesses.

"As a data center provider, we will always make sure we have the ability to sustain ourselves through any public utility issues," Michael Landesman, VP of infrastructure operations at Rackspace, told The WHIR. "We don't want to be at the mercy of anything they're doing. Which means that if there is a power problem, regardless of whether it's over utilization, they've oversubscribed or whether they just have a local issue, we will always be able to generate and sustain our own power."