RE: Power Outage story ...

["Graap, Ken" <keg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Believe it or not, our generator is a tried and true diesel generator...
That it failed during a monthly test and took everything with it wasn't very
comforting, but at least the fire in the switch didn't spread! Ha! We were
lucky that this was an "attended" test.

Apparently the UPS was sized to just provide enough time for the generator
to kick in and the draw on the UPS was such that it only lasted about 20
minutes. Not enough time for us to react and shut things down in an orderly
manner... Yes, I know I could have investigated hooking the AS/400 up to the
UPS and monitoring for it's status and shutting down automatically when it's
batteries got low, but we figured the risk was low enough not to worry about
this because after all, we did have a generator... So much for the low risk
scenarios. We got "bit" big time on this one. I guess this is a great
example of learning through experience. 

I don't know if SMAPP is turned on by default. Does anyone else know? Before
we upgraded to our 730 a few years ago, we had to turn it off because the
overhead was more than our system could handle at the time. After our first
power "issue" in Nov. of 2002 I decided that we couldn't risk having to
recover access paths for 6 hours again. The newer system (8 way CPU and 95
disk arms) provided enough system resource to use SMAPP without noticing
it... thank goodness too!

Kenneth 

-----Original Message-----
From: G Armour [mailto:garmour400m@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 11:09 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Power Outage story ...


Hey Ken,

Just curious.  Given that yours is a natural gas company, does your
emergency power generator run on NG?

Sounds like you need to do something with the UPS's.  Have you figured out
what went wrong with them on both events?

Great news on SMAPP!  I wonder how many shops have this implemented? 
Doesn't the system get shipped with it set on?

GA