North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Battery Maint in LEC equipment

  • From: Michael.Dillon
  • Date: Wed Jun 08 05:12:30 2005

> As prices fall, so does level of service.  NANOGers all know 
> providing uninterruptible power in the current evolving networks is 
> hard as the communications infrastructure continues to decentralize. 
> Providing non stop power for long term power failures with generators 
> scattered all over the place is insanely hard. 

> Aside from human error, right now the weakest link in the net is the 
> grid, and that is a link that isn't apparently getting any stronger.

It is interesting to note that one cause of the 6 hour Internet
outage in Moscow was their belief that oin-site generators are
not needed for telecom facilities. They felt that their AC power
generation system was robust enough that providing 3 seperate
power feeds into the M9 site contain MSK-IX was sufficient.

And the power outage did show that the Russian power system
architecture was indeed more robust than the American one.
Their cascading failure was contained to a small area and 
power was restored faster than the August 2003 northeast
failure. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned here by
taking a closer look at what the Russian architecture is,
what they expected to achieve with it, and what went wrong
beyond the fact that old generators were not properly maintained
or replaced.

Is it possible to provide a municipal AC power grid for telecom
facilities that can reliably power those facilities without
recourse to on-site generators?

After all, if there are working circuits into a site that means
that there are undamaged paths which could be carrying AC current
into the site. And if there are functioning gas lines into a site
there are also undamaged paths which could be carrying AC current
into a site. Note that I am assuming that at least one of the
redundant power feeds into a site would be independent of the
power grid, i.e. a municipal generator that supplies only telecom
sites and data centers in a local area.

--Michael Dillon