[AusNOG] Primus Outage explanation

[Craig Askings]

On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 12:42 +1000, Paul Brooks wrote:
> Personally, I try to have at least 4 hours of battery life available - 
> which is generally enough time for the gensets to fail to start, get an 
> engineer on-site to attempt a manual start, and then kick/swear/curse 
> and threaten with escalating sizes of spanners until the genset kicks 
> over, or the mains power reappears, whichever comes first.

I prefer the way Globalswitch and some other DC's do it. Have way more
generators than you need to handle the load. So the odds of enough
starting first time and synchronising / taking load are much better.

Of course the flip side is that if they don't start, you are boned.
However given the number of power outages in the Sydney CBD this year
and the fact they haven't gone down does say something for their
engineering practices.

Craig.