Re: Postmaster @ vtext.com (or what are best practice to send SMS these days)

[Patrick Shoemaker]

My solution is to use a modem / POTS line hanging off the nagios box 
along with the qpage daemon to send alerts out through a TAP gateway. If 
you need the specs and 800 number for Verizon's TAP gateway I can send 
it offlist.


http://www.dynowski.com/blog/2006/05/19/using-nagios-with-quickpage-a-sms-tap-gateway/

This is important not only to avoid the inconsistency of the vtext 
email-sms gateway but to get an alert out in case of a major network 
disruption that breaks email functionality.


Patrick Shoemaker
President, Vector Data Systems LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
office: (301) 358-1690 x36
mobile: (410) 991-5791
http://www.vectordatasystems.com


David Ulevitch wrote:


We've noticed that [EMAIL PROTECTED] is no longer a very reliable 
form of delivery for alerts from Nagios, et al.  It seems as our volume 
of alerts has risen, our delivery rate has dropped precipitously.


We don't expect much trying to actually reach a postmaster for vtext.com 
  so I thought the better question would be to ask what the current best 
practice is to get SMS alerts out?


Back in the day, I remember a company I worked for had something called 
a TAP gateway.  Is that still a good route?  I've also been told to 
check out an SMS gateway/api service called clickatell.com  -- anyone 
using them to delivering timely notifications?


Is the best thing to do to try and get a programmable cellphone in a
datacenter?

What else are operators doing to get the pages out when things go wonky?

-David

Re: rack power question

[Patrick Shoemaker]

Joe Abley wrote:



On 25 Mar 2008, at 09:11 , Dorn Hetzel wrote:

It would sure be nice if along with choosing to order servers with DC 
or AC power inputs one could choose air or water cooling.


Or perhaps some non-conductive working fluid instead of water.  That 
might not carry quite as much heat as water, but it would surely carry 
more than air and if chosen correctly would have more benign results 
when the inevitable leaks and spills occur.


The conductivity of (ion-carrying) water seems like a sensible thing to 
worry about. The other thing is its boiling point.


I presume that the fact that nobody ever brings that up means it's a 
non-issue, but it'd be good to understand why.


Seems to me that any large-scale system designed to distribute water for 
cooling has the potential for hot spots to appear, and that any hot spot 
that approaches 100C is going to cause some interesting problems.


Wouldn't some light mineral oil be a better option than water?


Joe



With IT systems, the equipment being cooled would likely reach thermal
overload and trip offline before the cooling water could flash to steam.
 Of course a properly designed system would have relief valves anyway.

One problem with mineral oil is the specific heat. Water has a specific
heat of 4.19 kJ/kg-degC. Light mineral oil is 1.67 kJ/kg-degC. That
means much higher mass flow rates (bigger pumps, tubing, more
dynamichead loss, etc) for oil than water to transfer the same amount of
heat. Oh, and if you want to see whether mineral oil burns, check out
this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZipeaAkuC0 (that transformer
is filled with mineral oil).

Sun has some good concepts going with its green datacenter initiative.
Their approach of using extremely scalable power and cooling
distribution systems that are customizable at the rack level allows for
a wide variety of densities and configurations throughout the room.
Check out the tour at this link:

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/green/datacenter.jsp


--
Patrick Shoemaker
President, Vector Data Systems LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
office: (301) 358-1690 x36
mobile: (410) 991-5791
http://www.vectordatasystems.com