We've got several APCs, and some Tripplites. My complaint with the APCs is they seem to over charge their batteries. We've replaced many batteries where they were swollen and had leaked. Maybe 3 to 4 years old and had not had more than an hour or two total battery run time. So far the Tripplites have not had that problem and cost seems to be about the same. We haven't gotten into bigtime management yet. We set up the software on one server, after 2 minutes on battery, a batch files is fired that shuts down all the servers in the rack, except the one directly connected to the UPS, then after 7 minutes the ups connected server shuts down and then at 10 minutes the UPS shuts off. So far that has worked well for us.
-----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 11:57 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: UPS recommendations Hi all, We had a power outage today. I looked over at the server rack just in time to see one of the UPSes light up like a Christmas tree, shriek like an injured parakeet, and then kill itself. (Admitted it was old, but a graceful failure this was not.) The servers with redundant supplies failed over to the other UPS, which promptly went into over-current alarm and dropped the load. Either said UPS's management software has been grossly misreporting its load, or two UPSes at 40% load doesn't include enough margin during transfer. Any which way you slice it, it's time to buy some new UPSes. I'm going to ask for two entirely new 1400 or 2200 VA units (existing were 1000 VA), although budget may be an issue. What do people like for UPSes, *and why*? I don't see much variation across manufactures in a given price band. At a given dollar amount, it seems I get roughly the same capacity, features, etc. I'm thinking differences in management software and quality of support don't show up in a spec sheet. Comments on that front are especially welcomed. In particular, I'm interested in how to manage a multiple-server, multiple-UPS scenario. Our two biggest servers have redundant supplies. I'd like to plug each supply into a different UPS. So each UPS will be powering multiple servers, and each server will be drawing power from multiple UPSes. I imagine that makes the management software configuration a bit trickier, specially since a lot of management packages used to assume one-UPS-per-server. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
