Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

As a journalist, I know what it is like to write a report at the last minute. So does another group of people who have cause to generate a lot of writing: students. So when the power recently went out at the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit school in Worcester, Mass., a number of students were feeling the pain.

“I had a six-page paper due the next day!” student Meghan Kearney told the campus newspaper, The Crusader last week.

Kearney and countless others were affected by a widespread Internet failure that lasted several hours recently when the campus data center had a snafu.

A safety device turned the power off to the college’s network operations center (NOC (News - Alert)), according to a college spokesman, resulting in an outage of all IT systems, including connectivity to the Internet. College staff were performing quarterly fire sprinkler testing as required by the Massachusetts Building Code.

It was a mechanical failure that caused an electronic control system to send a signal to the NOC that a set of emergency fire sprinklers had been activated. Because college routers and other important equipment are programmed to shut down when the fire sprinklers are active, nearly everything in the data center was shut off.

“Our NOC is equipped with a backup power generator so that IT systems remain operational in the case of a routine power outage on campus. That way, connectivity to the Internet and other IT systems is immediately available when campus power is restored,” noted college spokeswoman, Ellen Keohane. “However, since the fire system was triggered, even the generated power was cut off, causing all systems to shut down.”

It took several hours to bring the servers and disks and routers all back online, she added, but this was a fluke and even backup power would not have avoided this situation since the intent of the system was to shut things down if sprinklers were active, not keep the devices running.

This is little consolation for the students who needed the Internet for their work, however. And even though backup power would not have avoided this particular outage, it does highlight the need for backup power systems in general.