[98182] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Why do we use facilities with EPO's?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Wed Jul 25 15:14:11 2007
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:10:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
To: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>
cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20070725160747.GB75636@ussenterprise.ufp.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> What I found interesting is that a single EPO is not a hard and
> fast rule. They walked me through a twisty maze of the national
> electric code, the national fire code, and local regulations.
> Through that journey, they left me with a rather interesting tidbit.
Well.....
An Emergency Power Off button is a NEC (the electrical code adopted in
most of the USA) trade-off for allowing more flexible wiring practices in
computer rooms. If you don't use any of those alternative wiring
practices, you aren't required to install an EPO (modulo the rare local
code variation). The problem is some people want to get rid of the EPO,
but also want to keep using alternative wiring practices.
If you've looked in many computer rooms, you'll see some creative wiring
practices in use.
You'll notice Telco central offices don't have building EPOs. Likewise
Equinix data centers don't have EPOs. But they have limits on what
wiring practices can be used in their facilities compared to other
data centers.
