Well, it's clear by that statement that you have no idea of the infrastructure of a Data Center.

Believe it or not, I've designed both, and while I certainly don't claim to be an expert on all the IT equipment, I've got a pretty good idea of the electrical systems that go into them.

My description of the emergency branches was intentionally vague because their full definitions comprise some dozens of pages in NFPA 99. I assumed most people wouldn't care about that level of detail :-)

Anyway, my point was that while a typical data center has 3 types of power available (Normal, Emergency and UPS), a typical hospital usually has at least 5:

Normal
Emergency (Life Safety)
Emergency (Critical)
Emergency (Equipment)
Emergency (UPS)

These generally include separate panels, feeders, automatic transfer switches...etc, so I still stand by my claim that hospitals have the more complex electrical system. Also consider that hospitals now contain increasingly critical data center facilities. Of course I will concede that the UPS topology of a large data center is generally far more complex then a hospitals....but again, that's just one part of the puzzle.

"Starting" and closing to the Buss are 2 very different things. If you believe that large generators are starting and closing to the buss at full voltage and balanced frequencies in 3 seconds, I have a bridge that you may be interested in purchasing. To give you some perspective, our 2 generators for our Data Center (2 Megawatts each) start and close to the buss (and are assume the building load) in 15 seconds. We, of course, circulate the heated jacket water to keep the oil, cylinders, etc warm and ready as you described.

I'll take that bridge. The reason your generators take 15 seconds to start is that they comprise a Level 2 system (as defined in NFPA 110), and not the Level 1 system that hospitals require. Level 1 includes a whole bunch of additional requirements (ie...expense) that are simply not required where the outage will not potentially risk human life, ie, datacenters. Now i'm not sure about all the modifications that manufacturers must make to their gen sets to meet these requirements, but I can assure you that that 10 second start (which includes startup, sync and bus connection) is required by code. Also, I've been there at the monthly test that hospitals are required to perform and yep...they really are that quick.

Now again...it's not that your generators are bad...it's just that theirs no reason for a company to spend the extra cash on that sort of system when a longer startup time will do; typically the UPS is sized for 15 minutes of runtime and the HVAC equipment can go down for a few minutes without the room overheating.

There are many components that you're probably unaware of and layers of redundancy that are invisible to those who do not work in the "back of house" Critical Environments. To reiterate, I'm not saying that hospitals aren't complex nor am I saying that they do not have Critical Environments within them. I'm simply saying that you may have a perception of what a Data Center is that is not necessarily consistent with what is actually the case.

Similarly, I'm not claiming that hospitals are more complex overall systems....just that their electrical distribution systems typically are.

-Chris

Yes, but if you lose your job for "no reason" you should be able to go on the dole.

I don't think it works that way for the H1-B