Jo Rhett wrote: > I'm evaluating several in-cabinet cooling and UPS options for a very > small server room environment. It's been a long time since I've deal > with less than 1mw UPSs and 75-ton AC units so I'm having to refresh > my brain ;-) > > Anyone have experience with the APC InfraStruXure, Leibert XDF, or > Knurr CoolTherm products (or any other options) and want to share war > stories? Poison-of-choice next time I see you will be payment ;-) > > I evaluated a bunch of this stuff a while ago for a particular niche (a lab where there was plenty of cold water but not a lot of cold air). We looked at all of the rack based solutions. We compared the Sanmina Ecobay (defunct), HP water cooled rack, Knurr/Emerson/Liebert Cooltherm/XDK, and an IBM product. In the end, the Knurr product is the best, which is just rebranded in the US as the Liebert XDK. It has some nice features like a temperature sensor that will cut the circuit for the electronic door closers when it detects overhead (lack of chilled water). The doors each have pistons that push the front and back open.
Liebert is TERRIBLE on support for this product, and even follow-through on install, so beware of that, but it's a good product. The little 1U rackmount thing will fit in one of the 1U vertical slots in the front (there are 3 1U slots on one side and 3 2U vertical slots on the other as well as about 40U of regular horizontal rack slots - it's wide). The 1U RM* product is ok.. it allows you to hook up termpature sensors, PDU sensors, and dry contact sensors for things like water condensing inside the unit. It will send you SNMP traps and/or emails. But: * Only 1 person can login at a time to the unit, and if you don't logout, you have to find that PC, launch a browser, connect to the unit, and then do a forced logout (or set an idle timeout, which is defaulted to 0) * The liebert PDU is just a rebranded one from Baytech. It's definitely not as good as an APC, ServerTech, or probably even some others. It also doesn't fit in the channel slots that they have in the cabinet for 'easy pdu mounting'. (what!?). We also had problem with the 3 phase PDU reporting preposterous results for overcurrent sometimes. 600 amps? really? and no fire eh? do tell. We ended up unplugging it from the RM monitor for sanity. In the end, I recommend the product, though watch out for the sales and pre-sales service, we spent many months trying to get everything just right before we settled for good enough. The rear door wasn't pushing open. They replaced the rear piston 3 times and then a wheel under the door (because it's so heavy). I also looked at some of the APC side-along cooler things. Those look nice too and integrate fairly well with their cabinetry in grand-APC style, but we didn't buy one. I've got some fun war stories about getting the XDK onto the 32nd floor of an NYC midtown building, too. :) _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
