On Sep 30, 2010, at 6:53 PM, da...@lang.hm wrote: > On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, Giovanni Tirloni wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> Recently during an electrical maintenance, we faced a problem with >> some >> servers that had redundant PSUs. After the power was shut down on the >> circuit that serves the first PSU, the second PSU failed to keep some >> servers up and they rebooted (came back normal and stayed stable >> after >> that). Tonight the same procedure was done on the other power >> circuit and >> the second PSU failed too (on a smaller number of machines). These >> are all >> enterprise-level servers which vendors will promptly replace failed >> PSUs.. >> but these PSUs were working fine as far as we can tell. Has anyone >> had this >> problem too? >> >> I'm looking for some advice regarding proactive PSU replacements. >> Is it a >> common practice? We do replace disks as proactively as we can by >> monitoring >> several performance metrics but for PSUs I'm at a loss here. > > PSU's can die over time, and there can (and have been) flaws in > design or components that will cause similar devices to start > failing at around the same timeframe. > > If I start having them fail on several servers, I accelerate efforts > to replace that generation of servers. > > the most common thing to fail in a PSU are the capacitors, and if > the vendor had a bad batch of caps that made it into the power > supplies, I would be reluctant to just replace the PSUs and put the > systems back into mission-critical use, if those caps are bad, how > can I really trust the other caps in the system? > > I am in the process of doing this with a batch of systems purchased > 5-6 years ago. > > David Lang_______________________________________________
Very true about them failing in batches, but.. the PSUs are almost never made by the same manufacturer as the motherboard etc. We had a batch of Sparkle PSUs all fail within months of each other, but the Supermicro motherboards are still going strong years later.. Jonathan _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
