BBN outage

Rob Gutierrez rmg at ranma.com
Mon Oct 14 21:44:42 UTC 1996


From: Nathan Stratton <nathan at netrail.net>
> 
> So BBN says they are now going to install a generator, my question is why
> was a generator not installed? They saved 20 - 100K on a generator, but I
> bet they will lose more then that when users leave. 

Forsythe Hall, where the BBN pop is located, has a standby generator, abet
not hooked up, to provide power when the Stanford CoGenerator facility
goes off, like it did.  The bldg UPS has plenty of power to keep the
facilities running until the standby generator can be hooked up (BBN
shares physical facilities with Stanford's IBM mainframe and the
Stamford DMS-100 telephone switch).

When I used to work there, I saw that generator all the time.  It collected
a lot of dust.  I was told that it was tested out from time to time :)
I wonder why it either 1) Did not work, or 2) Was not available ...

Across the street, at the hospital, there is another generator set up
on a trailer.  When the power was out, that one was not running.  I
would have thought that could have been disconnected and brought over
to Forsythe Hall to provide power for when the UPS's died off.

Telco wise, BBN does have a nice dirverse system.  Their MCI T-3 is on
a microwave that goes to Palo Alto, where it drops off to MCI's bay area
fiber ring between San Jose to San Francisco.  Some of their backbone T-3's
come into a Pac Bell OC-48, which has an entirely seperate protection
path into Stanford itself (Stanford alltogether has two Pac Bell OC-48's,
with a third one planned!).  Another fiber path belongs to MFS for more
dirversity.  So on that level, they have their act together.

	r.





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