At 11:56 AM 7/22/2004, you wrote:
Have anyone experienced hardware failure related to electrical spikes coming into your datacenters or equipment locations via the telco facilities? I am referring specifically to copper facilities for DS1's, etc. I know that the telco must maintain good grounding, but sometimes when you get hit with a few Gigavolts worth of electrical energy not much will help you. Whatever the case, has anyone had any experience good or otherwise with surge protection for their Telcom circuits? I am looking at this unit below as a possible solution.
Rule #1, don't trust the telco or the power company, or anyone else feeding wires into your building to do a good job keeping you safe from surges. A client of mine has what used to be a CSU/DSU... now has surface mount components missing and the like. They hadn't installed a surge protector on the T-1. They had covered the power and the antenna coaxes at the site. Only the T-1 line was unprotected. Lightning will find that one path you've not protected. The cost of installing a surge protector is unlikely to impact your bottom line. One successful lightning strike on the other hand will hurt quite a bit, and probably happen at 4AM just to be more annoying.
Daniel Senie wrote:
The cost of installing a surge protector is unlikely to impact your bottom line. One successful lightning strike on the other hand will hurt quite a bit, and probably happen at 4AM just to be more annoying.
Yes... we had a strike hit a remote mountain POP via the T1. From the router it managed to propogate onto the switch and from the switch onto the connected hosts and caused a catastrophic failure. Fortunately the hosts mainly lost their NICs. We have since purchased some polyphaser surge protectors. Can't remember if this was the vendor or not: http://www.comm-omni.com/polyweb/t1.htm Google has +400 matches on the exact phrase "T1 surge protector"
Polyphaser does make excellent surge supression gear they make it for all communications services. i.e. Broadcast Radio, television, cell sites, gov't/military. Being a ham I use their gear myself expensive but cheaper than a new rig. Especially since the rig is connected to a structure designed to attract electromagnetic fields. Scott C. McGrath On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Mike Lewinski wrote:
Daniel Senie wrote:
The cost of installing a surge protector is unlikely to impact your bottom line. One successful lightning strike on the other hand will hurt quite a bit, and probably happen at 4AM just to be more annoying.
Yes... we had a strike hit a remote mountain POP via the T1. From the router it managed to propogate onto the switch and from the switch onto the connected hosts and caused a catastrophic failure. Fortunately the hosts mainly lost their NICs.
We have since purchased some polyphaser surge protectors. Can't remember if this was the vendor or not:
http://www.comm-omni.com/polyweb/t1.htm
Google has +400 matches on the exact phrase "T1 surge protector"
A good principle is to only let fiber links into your buildings. This is especially a good idea with roof mounted satellite or P2P microwave links, which otherwise are basically lightening rods attached to your routers / rf equipment / whatever. I thought this was a PITA when I first encountered it with the Navy but it works and saves a lot of grief. On Jul 22, 2004, at 1:06 PM, Daniel Senie wrote:
At 11:56 AM 7/22/2004, you wrote:
Have anyone experienced hardware failure related to electrical spikes coming into your datacenters or equipment locations via the telco facilities? I am referring specifically to copper facilities for DS1's, etc. I know that the telco must maintain good grounding, but sometimes when you get hit with a few Gigavolts worth of electrical energy not much will help you. Whatever the case, has anyone had any experience good or otherwise with surge protection for their Telcom circuits? I am looking at this unit below as a possible solution.
Rule #1, don't trust the telco or the power company, or anyone else feeding wires into your building to do a good job keeping you safe from surges.
A client of mine has what used to be a CSU/DSU... now has surface mount components missing and the like. They hadn't installed a surge protector on the T-1. They had covered the power and the antenna coaxes at the site. Only the T-1 line was unprotected. Lightning will find that one path you've not protected.
The cost of installing a surge protector is unlikely to impact your bottom line. One successful lightning strike on the other hand will hurt quite a bit, and probably happen at 4AM just to be more annoying.
Regards Marshall Eubanks
participants (4)
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Daniel Senie -
Marshall Eubanks -
Mike Lewinski -
Scott McGrath