Rackmount UPS Units

[sam]

I assume that the datacenter that houses the servers provides some sort of external super-UPS that will carry everything along until a generator takes over.

But given the recent blight of internal power failures, maybe some rackmount UPS units to give the vmNN.unixshell.com servers some time to shutdown gracefully or ride out a short failure might be a good idea.

It might give us all those long uptimes and quiet beepers we all dream of.

[matta]

Hrm... that is one of those easier said than done things. We bring in 30A circuits (the twist style plug) and that goes into an Avocent SPC remote power control device. We'd need a UPS that can handle running 30A for a few minutes and that has a single plug in and out. I haven't done much research, but as far as I know for 2000watt that uses standard (<20A) circuits with 8 out costs quite a bit and 2000watt is nowhere near enough to handle 30A @ 120V (although usually we run circuits at 70% capacity).

[matta]

On a side note GNAX is usually very reliable with power (and network), they are just undertaking a large task by bringing in another main and had some mistakes made. Even when i've been in a Level (3) datacenter i've experienced a contractor accidently switching the wrong circuit off which affected an entire floor. It was amazing to see an otherwise quiet datacenter suddenly filled with all of your neighbors :)

[Bluecoat93]

One thing to keep in mind is that in many datacenters, rackmount UPS units are explicitly not permitted. This may seem counterintuitive, but many (most?) big datacenters/colocation facilities want you on their power alone. Often, this is required by the building codes. If you're providing your own backup power, when the fire department runs in and hits the Big Red Button to kill power to the entire center, your servers won't go down and some firefighter will get electrocuted.

I manage a 10-cabinet cage at an AT&T facility, and it's in our contract that we won't install any customer-owned UPSes for exactly the above reason.

[cjvdb]

[QUOTE=Bluecoat93]One thing to keep in mind is that in many datacenters, rackmount UPS units are explicitly not permitted. This may seem counterintuitive, but many (most?) big datacenters/colocation facilities want you on their power alone. Often, this is required by the building codes. If you're providing your own backup power, when the fire department runs in and hits the Big Red Button to kill power to the entire center, your servers won't go down and some firefighter will get electrocuted.[/QUOTE]

That's very interesting, thanks for the post.