Ah yes, the not-so-good pre-UPS days when even a fraction-of-a-second
power interruption could take down an entire DP center. I recall the
utility workers describing at least one roasted squirrel event and even
one roasted large-bird event that affected our transformer's HV feed,
although more of the problems were weather-related or human-related.
One amazing thing was that in the 1980's our utility power was much more
stable, rarely above three or four disruptive glitches a year. By 2000,
noticeable utility power glitches which reached our site had risen to
several a month and often were uncorrelated with local weather, but
fortunately by then the center was UPS-protected.
UPS-protecting all mainframe system hardware did significantly reduce
number of hardware failures we experienced. Even if you have an
environment where an abnormal shutdown and restart of the DP center is
is tolerable, an 8-hour or longer down time waiting on parts might not
be. These days, running a mainframe system without adequate UPS
protection should be considered false economy.
Joel C Ewing
On 03/14/2013 07:50 AM, John McKown wrote:
I think that "squirrel event" refers to a number of times that the IBM-MAIN
listserv went down due to a suicidal squirrel throwing itself onto a
transformer, causing a massive power surge, which cause a catastrophic
event in the computer center.
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 7:45 AM, zMan <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:05 AM, Ed Finnell <[email protected]> wrote:
Bon jour! We actually prosecuted a group of students who had managed to
overlay the weekly backup tapes with garbage and hoped for a 'squirrel
event'.
They came perilously close...
I don't mind looking dumb: what's a "squirrel event"? Sounds like something
Macy's would advertise...
--
zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it"
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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