Did you read the previous email from jhawk? There is an
extremely large generator at one of the affected facilities
(read: cogeneration plant) but no amount of fuel helps if
the plant is damaged in the explosion.
/John
p.s. No, we've have not deployed redundant power plants (yet)
I have dug through my nanog mail, and I don't see that. If I didn't look
hard enough, I apologize. (I did go through the last 2 days of mail)
/Power outages/ are one thing, **exploding power plants** is a bit
different story. That it something that is considerably more difficult
(and expensive as Sean points out) to prepare for and/or prevent.
(I wouldn't have made the comment I did had I known /this/).
I like, Sean, would have trouble investing (today) in a company that had
that level of engineering redundancy. On the other hand, a day in the not
too distant future will require that.
As more and more companies come to rely on the Internet like they rely on
the PSTN, we will be expected to have bomb-resistant networks. (not
bomb-proof, mind you), and we will have to be compensated for this level
of redundancy. This will day will come as we place more financial
transactions on the 'Net. This brings us to a point of "no net = no
income". I don't expect that any company connected to the Internet who is
not performing a large amount of monetary transactions will want to pay
for that level of redundancy.
Furthermore, this outage was not a backbone PoP, and companies I describe
above would probably elect to connect to a backbone node.
Rob Nelson
rnelson@internoc.com
At 12:21 PM -0500 on 97-8-8, Robert T. Nelson wrote:
As more and more companies come to rely on the Internet like they rely on
the PSTN, we will be expected to have bomb-resistant networks. (not
bomb-proof, mind you), and we will have to be compensated for this level
of redundancy. This will day will come as we place more financial
transactions on the 'Net.
Ironically, one of the categories of end-users who really
need dependable and uninterrupted net service right now are
the electric power companies. They are required under
federal mandate to conduct all their power-brokering
business over the public networks. In other words, when
Northeast Utilities sells some megawatts to Con Ed, the
transaction has to be scheduled on the Internet. So we're
set up for a situation where a failure of the power grid
brings down a part of the Net, and the Net outage impedes
restoration of the power grid.