BBN (GTE) Suffers another major power problem.

Fri Aug 8 15:39:28 UTC 1997

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 at internoc.com