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Today we are under the threat of “rolling power outages”. Check ceelectricuk.com for more details on them.
Basically, because not everything is working 100% on the power grid, they are moving the power around to allow for investigation, clean ups and fixes. As a result, we may lose power at any point. (edit: I’ve just been told that we should expect one between 12 and 3pm. edit 2: Now NOT happening!).
We’ve got network engineers and sysadmins out at all our Sheffield sites, checking things over and doing test fail overs on the hardware. In principle, the service should be fine but of course it’s better to be safer than sorry. We actually had a power failure in S1 last night which was looked after by our UPS kit. Part of this testing it is to make sure the UPS kit is still in good working order after that fail over. Just to make something clear, we do this sort of testing regularly, but when you know there is a high risk, it would be dumb not to test them again!

Our internal forums are extremely busy, being filled with comments and “all clears” from the engineers as they investigate and check kit. It’s quite dramatic in a way. This is a copy of one of the threads we’ve generated from the meetings:

backup generators have 8 hours of fuel and plan for resupply if necessary.
fieldhouse way is still dry and has good power supply.
Action plan in place on calls and tickets
call being made now to liberata.
homeworkers working tickets
S/S on the way out re tickets
also link in SS re dam and what we will then need to do.
need a plan for nightshift
confirmed IH1 is still dry.
temp call centre at IH ready
Carl N executing DR plan for phone redirection
Sarah executing DR plan for symposium IVR.
contacted teleworker situation
Will security stay here: yes.
4pm next call.

If we do lose power in S1, it’s likely to be for about 3 hours. This means I’ll be heading home to keep working from there (provided my house has power. It was turned off again at 7:30 this morning). If so, I’ll update this post again.

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This entry was posted by Kelly Dorset on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 12:59 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.