Re: UPS question

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On 30/09/14 05:28 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:

On Tue, September 30, 2014 2:13 pm, Digimer wrote:
On 30/09/14 03:07 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:

On Tue, September 30, 2014 1:41 pm, Digimer wrote:
On 30/09/14 02:33 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
so I have a bunch of servers at work that are on DUAL UPS's (1 per
each
of 2 power supplies).

The only thing that stopped me from doing that was: you can only use
each
UPS up to a half of its spec'ed current drain.

Thinking in line of: having 2 UPSes for rack, how do you distribute
power
from them to machines which luckily have 2 power supplies each (for
redundancy). Having 1 PS wired to one UPS and 2nd PS to second UPS will
save you if one of UPSes failed (and does not provide any output AC).
But
in this case you will need UPS as powerful (current drain wise) as to
power the whole rack. So you are paying for reliability by using UPSes
of
double capacity. Did I not miss anything? I guess I almost did: if you
have 4 UPSes for 2 racks you can wire them so that if only one of 4
fails,
you will have increase in draw of all UPSes only by 1/3...

I decided _we_ are not that rich anyway...

In our case, that is what we do. We're an HA shop, first and foremost,
so *everything* has to be redundant. So yes, each UPS, on it's own, has
to be able to hold up all equipment for the minimum specified runtime.
That said, it's not really a "waste", because when there is a total
poewr out, we get twice the minimum hold-up time, which comes in very
handy at times.

For example, we had a client who runs Windows VMs on out system. There
was a major power out event that we knew was going to outlast the backup
power (they're a manufacturing facility, so if the machinery isn't up,
then the servers aren't doing much). After we determined that we had to
shut everything down, we found that someone had not turned of MS's
automatic updates. So one server decided that it was a great time to
install updates during a critical outage.

Thanks to having the extended runtime, we were able to shed some load
and hold up the host node and the server long enough for windows to
finish all of it's OS updates. Obviously, this should never have
happened in the first place, but it's an example of how extra runtime
can come in super helpful.


Which asks for one more piece of equipment (hopefully you are not on a
high floor...): diesel generator. That kicks in if the power doesn't
return after some short outage. (I was almost sure you mention it
somewhere closer to the end...)

Valeri

Some of our clients have that, but not all of them. Even the ones that do, though, can have trouble. A different recent client had a major incident in their power distribution room (fire and/or explosion). They had enough fuel for 6~8 hours of operation. They couldn't get more fuel in time and ended up having to shut down their production facility until they could arrange a more long-term solution.

You can go to great lengths to protect yourself, but there will always be limits. It's a question of where your paranoia and budgets meet.

--
Digimer
Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.ca/w/
What if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a person without access to education?
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