> You need a back up generator and to be a short distance away from a petrol station so you can refuel quickly and regularly when suffering from longer durations of power outages.
I don't see why the petrol station needs to be a short distance away. Unless the plan is to walk to the petrol station and back (which should not be the plan[1]), anyplace within reasonable driving distance should do.
[1] long duration electrical outages will often take out everything a short distance away, and the petrol stations usually have electric pumps.
Because there are laws on what you can and cannot fill with fuel. So you may find you have to make smaller but more frequent visits.
Also buying fuel for a petrol station is going to be more expensive than having a commercial tanker refill it. So ideally you wouldn’t be making large top ups from the local petrol station except under exceptional outages.
As for wider power outages affecting the fuel pumps, I suspect they might have their own generators too. But even if they don’t, outages can still be localised (eg road works accidentally cutting through the mains for that street - I’ve had that happen before too). So there’s still a benefit in having a petrol station near by.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting those petrol stations should be 5 minutes walking distance. Just close enough to drive there and back in under half an hour.
A typical multi-MW power-hungry high-tech facility (datacenters, manufacturing, hospitals etc) will have large underground fuel storage tanks big enough to run the full load on generators for couple of days and they are continuously kept refilled via fuel tanker trucks through contracts with bulk fuel distributors. They usually have an SLA of a 40KL tanker in 4 hour notice. In case of advance warning of heavy-rains/floods or other natural disasters that can disrupt road networks, they can have more fuel trucks situated close-by as stand-by. Depending on your contract, you may have priority over other customers in the area. These are fairly standard practices.
indeed but that wasn’t the type of facilities that the GP was talking about when they said running web services were a solved problem.
If you do move to an established data centre then you’re back to my earlier point that you’re still then dependant on their services instead of having ownership to fix all the problems yourself (which was the original argument the GP made in favour of switching away from the cloud).
> I don't see why the petrol station needs to be a short distance away
some natural disasters can render driving trickier than walking. extremely large snow storms, for instance. you can still walk a block, but you might be hard pressed to drive 5 miles.
(i don't have a bone in this particular cautiousness-fight; personally i'd just suggest folks producing DR plans cover the relevant natural disasters for the area they live in, while balancing management desires, and a realistic assessment of their own willingness to come to work to execute a DR plan during a natural disaster.)
I don't see why the petrol station needs to be a short distance away. Unless the plan is to walk to the petrol station and back (which should not be the plan[1]), anyplace within reasonable driving distance should do.
[1] long duration electrical outages will often take out everything a short distance away, and the petrol stations usually have electric pumps.