Building Evacuation [Re: BBN outage]

Tue Oct 15 03:12:15 UTC 1996

On Mon, 14 Oct 1996, Kent W. England wrote:

> One thing constructive I would note that I haven't seen yet
> is that while one can imagine many awful scenarios where your
> lovely NOC is absolutely leveled (*) by a horrendous accident,
> it is much more likely that your NOC will be forced to evacuate
> for some "trivial" reason. Perhaps asbestos. Perhaps a gas main
> leak in the street. Perhaps the fire alarms just keep going off.
> Perhaps the power went off and the fire marshall won't let anyone
> stay in the building without elevator power. It might very well
> have been the case that had BBN had a backup generator they might
> still have been forced to evacuate the building, if the fire dept
> was paying attention.

Ah, ya, but when I leave my POP I don't shut off the gear, so what if BBN
staff had to leave (if there were any at that POP), the gear would be up
and that is what counts.

> You have to remember that it's harder to keep people in a given
> building than it is to safeguard the equipment there. You always 
> have to be ready to send your NOC operators packing with a cell 
> phone and a laptop for up to 48 hours, in case the building has 
> to be evacuated for one of a dozen reasons. You should have
> a backup call center with an ACD set up in some other city or
> a contract with someone for a backup service.

Right, this is why we build a 2 or more NOCs, and have them all up all the
time.

Nathan Stratton		  CEO, NetRail, Inc.    Tracking the future today!
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