[Outages-discussion] [outages] Evocative EWR1 (formerly INAP NYJ004)

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> said:
> This is New Jersey, sounds like some palms have not been properly greased. :)
> 
> "Nice datacenter you got here, shame if it didn't have some electricity..."
> 
> Curious what would happen if they just opted to power from the gensets.

I'm not in New Jersey, but when half the building I had a small
datacenter in burned down (front part was an copy/print shop, so
paper/ink/toner went WHOOSH) one night, the fire chief said we'd have to
wait until the next day sometime to get the fire marshal out; he wasn't
going to allow us in the building even (there was still some fire up
front at the time, they were worried about that roof collapsing, so us
wanting to turn the power on was pretty low on his priority list).

We explained that part of the city and utility Internet went through our
space, so he made a call, got a fire marshal who came out, and we went
over how our space was on a separate meter, didn't feed anything in the
burned part of the building (where they were still spraying water on hot
spots), etc., we got to walk through our space with him, and he agreed
to let us power back up.  But that was both fire chief and marshal being
nice and understanding and helping us out (and us being polite and
requesting when they weren't busy, rather than getting in their face and
making demands) - they didn't have to do that by any means.

Their job is (1) safety of their people, (2) safety of other people
(you, general public), (3) safety of the area (neighboring buildings,
cty infrastructure, etc.), and only after that (4) allowing you to
access your stuff.  Trying to change that priority list will never go
your way.

A couple of our colo customers showed up to find out what was going on,
and one tried to go in, get in the way of the fire department, etc.,
until one of our managers told him if he didn't shut up and leave
everybody (fire dept and us) alone, we'd just unplug his rack whenever
we DID go in.

-- 
Chris Adams <cma at cmadams.net>