GWOT Facilities Black NI

Data Structure Infrastructure Working Group.

As the senior surviving member of the Security team who might have a clue what anyone is talking about, I am required to attend.

The Data Center is the most secure part of our premises. I could tell you more, but my trigger finger is sore and I can't get the smell of blood out of my nostrils.

"... we have less than six days of fuel left ..."

I closed the cover of my laptop, where I had been plowing through a mass of Observation Tickets.

As the site had not been my original site of assignment, and I had been Just A Little Fucking Busy for the last few months, I had only the grossest overview of the statistics.

Let's say the Data Center can be powered by one generator. It's not true, but let's pretend. "Generator equivalents."

Most data centers would have two to four generators.

We had - remember, these are equivalents - sixty eight (68). Not capacity. Individual systems.

Any two systems could pull the load.

No point without fuel.

Our gensets ran on three basic fuels: gasoline, regular Diesel and biodiesel, and natural gas or propane.

Fortunately we had no on site propane storage beyond that used for forklifts. Small propane storages are small bombs. Big propane storages ... yeah.

Unfortunately, the fusion kiss San Francisco had received had messed up a lot more than hundreds of thousands of retirement plans. It had put a huge load on the surrounding infrastructure.

I still shuddered to think of what would have happened if the Bomb had dropped on say, Hayward. We'd be knifing each other for cans of beans in the dark.

The Bay Area was out of gasoline. The Bay Area was low on Diesel, and what little there was, had been spoken for. Generally by governments. The Bay Area, surprisingly enough, had continued to enjoy uninterrupted flows of natural gas. When the grid flickered and burped, our gensets fired up on the other other gas, and we were groovy.

"I know we can't store natural gas. But where did our Diesel go?"

There were looks around the room.

"We were in the middle of a tank refurbishment project. Half our tanks were empty for that."

I winced.

Don't even ask about solar. Not with the iron we were running. Our solar farm could run the lights, just enough fans to keep a skeleton crew from suffocating, and recharge our battery rooms to crank the generators after we were down for a while.

You see, it's a hard problem in resiliency. The more complex a system is, the more that can go wrong and the more that you need to fix it.

An equivalent military facility of our power needs would have a nuclear reactor. Not an option in sunny California.

Most of our Diesel tankage was built into the generators themselves. We had a supplemental tank farm.

Tank farms attract rockets.

At least, ours did.

Large numbers of people were getting deeply upset about the Firecracker War and Homeland's heavy handed approach to keeping civil order. Some of them were expressing their feelings kinetically.

That was the real reason for the rolling blackouts. Not lingering fallout. Not initial War damage. Rifle fire at substation components, mortar and rocket attacks (with both homemade and stolen munitions) on equipment and plants, hacking and physical intrusion.

The Richmond refinery had blown up due to a technical problem. I suppose four pounds of thermite in the wrong spot is technically a problem.

Unlike an equivalent facility, we did not have anti mortar radars and counterbattery fire. We had to make do with optics and antimaterial rifles. So far so good.

Protecting a static target is fairly easy. Protecting convoys is much harder. Protecting fuel trucks that blow up when you make a cutting remark about the driver's mother is harder yet.

So the power grid problems were going to get worse, not better. And bringing in our own fuel was not an option.

"How much can we cut load and still be viable?" I asked.

I had said the unspeakable thing. Voices were raised and the shouting began.

It wasn't anything the SLE hadn't said to me last week, when I'd brought up the impending fuel crisis. Only I'd thought we still had a month left.

I half listened to the rage matches as I thought hard. No practical amount of battery could carry the site's load more than thirty seconds. Even that was a nasty physics experiment. One (thank God pre Firecracker) hot load test had set a battery room on fire. Due to paranoid anti hydrogen gas precautions it hadn't blown up.

"How good does the quality of fuel have to be?" I interrupted.

"We have fuel quality testing equipment."

"Security has been fueling our vehicles from the community and the site motor pool storage. That's only a thousand gallons. But we have over a thousand cars in the parking lot and they are typically half tank. That's another couple thousand gallons, but it's old."

There were head shakes around the room.

"We need more fuel than that. A lot more."

So how much fuel is six days worth?

I only realized I'd asked out loud when someone answered. It was a number in the single thousands.

"Easy answer. What is the efficient consumption / production load of one generator? Congratulations. That's our new maximum server capacity. The rest of the iron shuts down every time the grid browns."

Cue screaming.

The VP Facilities took out a pencil and started scratching on his notepad.

"Now, how long will the fuel last, at that rate of consumption?"

"Months..." someone groaned. "But that's _nothing_ compared to what we normally run."

"Is it enough?"

Ask a tank driver to think in miles per gallon rather than gallons per mile. He'll start laughing.

Problem defined, they started working on it.

I opened my laptop and went back to my tickets.

Sometimes it's all in how you ask the question.

Hey Buddy, got any Diesel you can spare?