Have you

[glennda]

We are being told that over the Christmas period the power is going to be turned off for about a week as the Electrical contractors have to inspect/test every circuit in the building (something like 2300 seperate circuits across the site). has anybody ever had this situation? As we are contemplating hireing a generator to power our systems (ups's run off a 32amp IP44 connector's). We host a major amount of stuff online which we will require students to access through the holiday period.

 

Has anybody done things like this? Our fibre line should run fine throughout the downtime.

 

Pro's/con's of doing such?

 

obviously we would need a generator capable of 20KVa by my calculations and alot of fuel.

 

And also cooling the room could be costly.

[featured_spectre]

Been told its happening before, and it worked well as it gaves us a chance to tidy up the cabinets and comms racks. Think of it this way, you can get all labelling done and get caught up on some documentation and photographing your network to go with the documentation

[glennda]

I'm happy to do that at the edge i just don't thing SLT will like the idea of things being off externally as we are pretty much reliant on the services we provide in house as the services have been brought in house. So just not sure if they will be happy at going off for a week - when they will want students to be revising for exams come Jan.

[FN-GM]

One of my schools had it done. They did an area at a time and not shut off the whole school.....

[robmal]

Can't see your insurance allowing you to run generators overnight unsupervised, big fire risk.

 

Fancy long hours of lonely overtime?

[glennda]

Can't see your insurance allowing you to run generators overnight unsupervised, big fire risk.

 

Fancy long hours of lonely overtime?

 

There shouldn't be a risk of fires - I've worked at multiple places that have had generators working 24/7 and not always had people watching them. (mainly festivals and normally within about 15ft of 47kg gas canisters).

 

Apparently they need to turn off the main school feed. (its happened before but not for as long).

 

I'm just going off the rough timescales the sparkies gave me earlier - I had been notified there would be downtime but no time details where given.

[jamesreedersmith]

Commercial generators are designed to run for days, unsupervised and unchecked - they all genrally have safeguards and auto shut offs built in and are in secure safe cabinets - sited and set up and grounded properly they would be fine.

[robmal]

....I stand corrected then!

 

Modern generators are a lot more safe than my experiences some time ago taught me

[p858snake]

Why do your students need access to the systems over the christmas period?

[glennda]

Why do your students need access to the systems over the christmas period?

 

Homework - We rely totally on web based systems for setting homework. Plus we also host various other stuff for other things.

[CHR1S]

We ran off generators for a while, size of a skip and loud! (Neighbours didn't like it) Expensive and require frequent topping up (depends on drain obviously) and security could be an issue if your in a dodgy area. Ours was iffy and didn't give a clean steady supply, this wont matter if you run via your UPS's tho.

[mrbios]

Got our own generator in place that we own powering both our server room and office, no need for rentals On the downside, means i very very rarely ever get to turn everything off and make the server room silent (which is a strangely pleasant experience)

[MatthewL]

If the test need doing have a shut down, plenty of notice period for resources to be made available and printed now.

 

Take it as time to get caught up and get things tided in the comms/server room.

[GrumbleDook]

It might be worth looking at whether a Virtualisation Host could take some of them on for you for a limited period of time. Compare the cost of it to the cost of the generators, etc .. but don't forget to take into account the downtime for snapshots to be put onto the host. The same DR solutions some places use allow for a quick switch but they are not cheap and you might have to fiddle around with some DNS for it to be happy.

[laserblazer]

Talk to the contractors, you may find they can work with you. They say everything has to be turned off but that's often the easiest thing to say.

[Heebeejeebee]

We had the same thing done in the summer. I liaised with the contractor to make sure I / he was aware of which areas were not to be switched off without letting us know beforehand and which areas were 'non critical' so they could be done first. Because of this we had about a day of downtime rather than the forecast two weeks.

 

Talk to someone now!

 

HBJB