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Re: San Francisco Power Outage

  • From: Ben Scott
  • Date: Thu Jul 26 09:12:35 2007
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On 7/25/07, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: 
... fire department evacuating the data center, cutting off electricity
in the area, and forbidding the diesel generators to be switched on?


 I know a guy who was at the US Data Centers Inc facility in
Marlborough, MA (before USDCI failed).  Soon after they first opened
it up, they had a fire.  The problem was the fire was *in* the giant
APC/Silicon system they had.  They had to kill the APC, and that took
the load down too.

 So they installed an external transfer switch, rather than depending
on the one built-in to the APC system.  There was some SNAFU with the
wiring, so right after the install, there was an electrical fire --
this time in the external transfer switch panel.

 While I suspect poor planning/testing contributed to their woes, it
still goes to show: Some days you're the windshield, and some days
you're the bug.

-- Ben