Hi All,

I'm not sure if this is an appropriate forum for such a question, so I'll take 
silence as a 'nope'...

At the moment we are having a disagreement with another DC provider regarding 
their power delivery to our racks we are renting there. This started because a 
few weeks ago they had a fault which resulted in a complete loss of power to 
both "A" and "B" feeds to our comms racks for approx. 25 minutes.

They have since confirmed that this outage was caused by: "...a single UPS 
battery failing during a mains failure simulation test, resulting in the 
shutdown of the UPS."

The power solution we are paying for each rack is defined (in their own words) 
as being made up of two chargeable elements:

1 x "Single Phase Primary Power"

1 x "Single Phase Redundant Diverse Power"

Consequently, I now have two issues with them:

"Redundant" - As far as I believe, this implies that a system (such as a UPS 
chain) will be at least N+1 and therefore can tolerate a single failed 
component or UPS. It should certainly tolerate a single failed battery within a 
single UPS within a chain.

"Diverse" - My understanding of this is that it should include power from two 
'diverse' sources. Since both our feeds failed in parallel when this single UPS 
fault occurred. I therefore argue that their solution is not diverse either.

Thus, the overall claim that our dual feed racks have "Redundant Diverse Power" 
is, IMHO, false.

Obviously as a provider ourselves we have our own terms and interpretations of 
power delivery - but I'm not looking to do an 'Us vs. Them' or anything, my own 
view will be skewed anyway. So I'm asking here as I'm genuinely interested in 
what other people would expect their level of service to be after purchasing 
products named exactly as I've shown above, from a large multinational 
provider. (I'm also not interested in naming the provider, that's not what this 
is about.)

I've also been unable to find anything particularly useful online, either in 
terms of backing up my either my understanding of the definitions being used, 
or backing up their interpretations.

I welcome your thoughts - cheers!

Robert Williams
Custodian Data Centres
https://www.CustodianDC.com

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