>
>
> The BBN Cambridge POP is "down and out" after a nearby manhole fire cut
> power to the building housing the POP.
>
>
> -Where is the generator backup?
It's my understanding that BBN had emergency generator backup, but that it was
insufficient to cover this outage. I'm pretty sure I saw that in one of
their ticket emails last night, although it's not in the official ticket
history.
It's my understanding that a battery supply that lasts long enough to get
the emergency generator running, along with a fuel contractor to keep the
generator topped off, can last over rather long outages.
The question is, what gets power? Assuming you're the size of BBN, it
becomes.. er.. "physically impractical" to power everything with a
generator. I know when I was at RPI, though they had a room full of
batteries (3-5 minutes of power), and a huge generator, it was only
enough to power the telephone system and mainframe. In fact, it
couldn't handle the water cooler for the mainframe. But the point is,
even though (I hope) BBN isn't using a power-hungry mainframe, enough
routers, switches, NOC workstations, etc. will eventually add up to
more kilowatts than you can supply yourself. A decision has to be
made as to what stays on and what doesn't.
I do not agree at all, the question is what do you want to PAY to keep up.
When we started we just provided generator feed just of our gear. After we
lost power for +12 hours and our AIR units were off we learned that
everything must be on generator. They make LARGE generators, we have a
750KVA in Atlanta, and are installing a 1000KVA in Chicago. It can be
done, just not cheep.
Nathan Stratton President, CTO, NetRail,Inc.
If you're in a 24x7, customer-driven market, you should have either:
a) enough go-juice (via fuel contractor) to go until the grid is on-line
OR
b) smaller NOCs.
There is no excuse for a large player like GTE to lose power for any
extended period off time. (I can understand a brief, reboot long, outage
if something went awry, but hours? No sir.)
Rob Nelson
President, INTERNOC (tm)
the internetwork operating company, inc.
+1.210.299.INOC / rnelson@internoc.com
Before this gets too out-of-hand, let me just say "forget what I said
before". It doesn't apply to BBN. Yes, they should have had adequate
backup power. A clear case of posting before waking up on my part.