I understand. This question may be one of those occasions requiring some careful but simple explanation. Ultimately any customer is free to disregard your good advice and take responsibility for whatever they do. But if the law or a regulation (such as a fire code) says there has to be a single physical "big red switch" on any piece of electrical equipment above a certain voltage (not only mainframes), and it has to be human accessible at all times, at least for anyone in the room, then your hands are tied, and properly so I think.
I was serious about Parallel Sysplex here. There is a very small but non-zero risk that someone could cut the power using the switch if there is any human (or creature?) physical access to the room housing the machine. But there are other potential risks as well. You name it, it has probably happened. Somebody could spill a big bucket of cleaning solution on the machine. (The machine would do its best to live on, but it depends on how fluid, how reactive, how voluminous, and how well aimed that bucket is. :-)) A water sprinkler system could trigger accidentally, an army or police could march in and seize the equipment (yes, that one has happened), the floor could collapse, some other piece of equipment could catch fire, the data center could burn to the ground, a tornado could strike, a vehicle could collide with the machine, there could be a nearby gas leak, etc., etc. So inadvertantly hitting the big red switch is one item on a very long list of hopefully unlikely but non-zero risks. Except the big red switch is there to mitigate even bigger risks, at least in the eyes of the fire code. Parallel Sysplex (and GDPS), properly implemented and well managed, neatly mitigate myriad risks. They're good options if this is a big enough concern to your customer. Then they'd have to inadvertantly hit two big red switches, meters or even kilometers apart. It'd take someone with exceptionally long arm reach to do that. :-) - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
