Early warning system

Thu Mar 22 22:33:21 UTC 2001

* Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> [20010322 13:35]:
> 
> If you had advanced notification of (5 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes,
> etc) would it make a practical difference in what you do?

No.  The only time advanced notification is even going to be possible is
during planned outages, such as, say, rolling blackouts.  The outages that
most worry me are unplanned outages since their ETR is less predictable and
I will potentially be more likely to need to consider things such as stressing
about whether the fuel contractor's SLA is really worth a shit.. (e.g. if it 
is an extended outage).

> If the answer is yes, how much would it be worth to you, for how much
> advance notice?

Of planned outages: little more than a FYI.  Noteworthy but doesn't 
change a thing -- generator has to be ready at all times anyway.   Hmm...
actually I just thought of one minor use: scheduling maintenance windows 
around a planned outage might be useful.  In reality though, you're 
maintenance windows should already have contingencies for this sort of thing
by default.  And any serious data center has multiple generators/UPSi for
maintenance on one set while the other is in use anyway.

Of unplanned outages: I'd probably want to invest in your company for its
psychic abilities. ;-)  Maybe expand out into the stock market, etc., etc. :)

-jr

----
Josh Richards [JTR38/JR539-ARIN]
<jrichard at geekresearch.com/cubicle.net/fix.net/freedom.gen.ca.us>
Geek Research LLC - <URL:http://www.geekresearch.com/>
IP Network Engineering and Consulting
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