I’ve read about Flywheels replacing batteries in the datacenter for the longest time but hadn’t taken the time out to do the research on how they exactly worked. The costs of maintaining a healthy bank of batteries, getting the maintenance and using infrared to determine possible future failure are overwhelming and make the difference in overall uptime for a datacenter.

Here’s a plain english presentation of how it works and a non working model is demonstrated. Video is 2:26 minutes long and is courtesy of Datacenter Videos.