August 2003


ORION stays online during blackout

While the Great Blackout of 2003 wreaked havoc throughout Ontario and most of the northeastern United States on August 14, affecting industry and the telecommunication sector particularly hard, “Black Thursday” was also an ideal stress test for the ORION network, the world’s newest advanced R&E optical network.

Partially operational only since June, the network proved its mettle and remained mostly online throughout the entire blackout.

All but two of ORION’s connected PoPs stayed on line for the duration of the blackout, thanks to ORION’s state-of-the-art power backup system.

Backup power also kicked in for the PoPs at York University and the Sudbury PoP, but those two sites eventually went down when batteries were depleted, some 11 hours later, when local power failed to come back online.

“This was a good stress test before the start of the school year and the production level provisioning of the network,” said Sam Mokbel, ORION’s Project Director. “All other services functioned normally and NOC and Engineering support was available and received the proper alarms and responded accordingly.”

The York PoP remained operational until 3:03 a.m. Friday morning when the ORION backup battery power was exhausted, almost 11 hours after the power failure started. The PoP automatically came back up when power was restored at 5:37 a.m.

The Sudbury PoP remained operational until 3:00 a.m. Friday morning when the batteries were drained and came back up at 5:39 a.m. It lost power again at 6:02 a.m. because of a faulty main circuit breaker. The fault was identified and the breaker changed with the cooperation of our Sudbury PoP colleagues. The PoP resumed operations on Saturday at 10:36 a.m.

“What we’ve learned is that the network managed to continue to operate at near full capacity, and that our only limitation was the local power and local connections.

“This is a testament to the robustness of the ORION network design,” said Phil Baker, President and CEO. It certainly gives confidence to our users, who rely on the network to transport critical research and other data.

Ironically, the blackout occurred just as the ORANO Board of Directors was wrapping up an important planning meeting in Mississauga. Like most travelers that day, members experience major delays in getting back home.


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