For example, I have real-life experience from this event:

http://programming.oreilly.com/2007/07/365-main-datacenter-p...

And that was a top-tier datacenter at the time. Good luck doing better on your own, and just punt if you are using the cloud.

I totally agree--the architecture I'm calling for is to have redundant UPS's, each managed by InfiniSQL processes--for ultimate availability. If people just want high performance but want to live with a datacenter / cloud provider's ability to maintain power, then I want to support them in that, too.

But I've suffered power outages in data centers, and they'll eventually come around to bite everybody.