Why do we use facilities with EPO's?

Wed Jul 25 22:00:26 UTC 2007

>If they can be avoided, why do we put up with them?

Major electrical fire, or arcing in the datacenter.

Flood in the datacenter.  

Accidental water sprinkler discharge in the datacenter.

Equipment fire that the FM-200 didn't put out, and you want
not to have the sprinklers go off if you can avoid it.

Equipment fire in a room without FM-200 in the first place.

Equipment fire with sprinkler discharge, and you'd really
rather just dry out the equipment than have to replace it all.

Electrical worker who's electrocuted himself and going
to die if you can't make the power go away.

There are a very few exceptions, but for our practical
purposes, people really ought to simply go to multiple
site redundancy rather than thinking about bending
major safety assumptions in how we operate individual
buildings.  You may have a few less outages, but you
may also kill someone.

What the Navy does on ships, for critical ship safety
and combat systems; what the FAA does for their radar
facilities and air traffic control facilities; what Telcos
do, these are different operating regimes, and there are
associated higher risk acceptance with the different equipment
setups and safety procedures.

-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com