On Fri, 8 Aug 1997, Christopher Masto wrote:
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.
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