[Gllug] [OT]fire at redbus?

[Christopher Hunter]

 On Wed 16 Jun, Tethys wrote:

> Is it just me, or is anyone else concerned about power failure in their
> hosting centre? I mean, our hosted machines have two independent power
> feeds, with near instantaneous failover between the two. But even if
> those fail, the whole datacentre has UPS backup via a massive battery
> array in the basement, and two diesel generators to back those up.
> The prospect of that level of redundancy not being enough to keep the
> juice flowing is somewhat... disturbing!

On Wednesday 16 Jun 2004 10:06 am, Chris Bell wrote:

>    Vital equipment is fed via dual power supplies from different mains
> feeds, and we have had the linking unit (two massive diodes) go up in
> smoke. We have had just about every kind of emergency standby fail at some
> time, although luckily not always when it really mattered. But then it was
> fairly normal to have well over 50 million people watching when things did
> go wrong, and you might see it repeated several times over the next few
> days.

I recall a similar event at the BBC (BH) at a Christmas some years ago, just 
prior to the Royal Speech - public supply failure, and blocked diesel 
generator exhausts, so no power!  Broadcasting continued by means of a 
battery-powered OB unit.....

I found it particularly scary that much of the monitoring equipment that I 
used to work on in nuclear power stations is entirely mains powered - with 
little or no provision for backup power.  

Chris

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