24x7 Support Strategies

Thu Jun 14 12:42:31 UTC 2007

[Sorry, I have a hosed copy of #*@! Outlook, which crashes whenever I tell
it to prefix earlier comments with >]

-----Original Message-----
From: William F. Maton Sotomayor [mailto:wmaton at ryouko.imsb.nrc.ca] 
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 8:14 AM
To: Howard C. Berkowitz
Subject: RE: 24x7 Support Strategies

On Thu, 14 Jun 2007, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:

>
> This topic interests me very much, and I had a BOF about staff development
> at the Montreal meeting in 1999.  I remember some of the details, and,
while
> I am no longer generally doing course development, I have some pretty
strong
> ideas of what reasonably constitutes a proper training sandbox for a major
> ISP.

Actually, it's BOFs like these that I would like to see revisited from 
time to time by NANOG.  The 'big' BOF I always wanted to see revisited in 
great detail was the data center one from the late 1990's.

[Howard C. Berkowitz] 
I remember that one well. As an aside, while I recognize it would be a whole
new level of effort, I'd really like to see -- and will work on if needed --
some NANOG documents other than copies of presentations.  The data center
ones were very good, and Sean Donelan has a couple of great tables that pull
together a huge amount of information on data/carrier centers.

A related area that might well be worth revisiting is cooling. IIRC, it was
someone from Google, at the Intel developer conference, who said that their
power and HVAC costs were rapidly approaching the cost of their servers. He
laid down a challenge for chipmakers to be more energy-efficient.

My understanding is that at a certain level of scaling, chilled water
becomes very efficient. A few municipal areas have chilled water utilities,
while in others, you may need to build your own system.  One of the
immediate questions will be to what extent you can use liquid chilling in
racks or even components, and when the best will be a rack heat exchanger or
chilled air input coming from the chilled water.

This is also a topic for operation in disasters, which is where my St. Louis
talk morphed. While I don't have all the details and would welcome them, I
understand that New Orleans made a hard decision during Katrina, which
probably would not have been made if there weren't contingency plans for it.
A telco tandem/toll office was one of the last ones operating in an area,
and it needed chilled water. Some of the chilled water distribution had been
knocked out. The city diverted a fire engine, even though there were fires,
to act as an interim pump so they continued to have long-distance telephony.