[AusNOG] OT: Brisbane Storm. Gentlemen, start your engines..

[Sam Silvester]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Skeeve Stevens <Skeeve at eintellego.net> wrote:
> Ok, on this. What do people think of doing your own bottom of rack ups in datacentres which supposedly have good protection with UPS and Gensets, but given industry experience, aren't always 100% reliable?
>
> I'm talking only something that gives a short period of time to deal with cutover delays as exampled here.
>
> The ups can always be powered by dual feeds with a transfer switch. Thoughts?

Add another voice to the "don't do this" brigade.

I'd use one (or two) rack-based ATS instead. We've got a couple of
situations where a given device has a couple of carrier circuits via
single-powered NTUs. In this case, we aim to feed half of the NTUs via
one ATS, the rest via the other, to keep as much up as possible in the
case of the ATS failing.

As others have mentioned, I'd be very surprised to find anybody
getting better reliability out of a rack-based UPS than they would be
getting from the datacentre provider. Another thing to keep in mind is
ease of replacement and servicing - presumably you'd be taking your
UPS offline for maintenance once or twice a year - achieving this
within the rack whilst also not shutting down the load could be a
challenge without introducing more potential points of failure.

FWIW, the media converter / NTU / CPE situation seems to be
improving...Those T-Marc units are available in dual DC and also
'kinda-sorta' dual AC (second supply via a wall wart, which I hate,
but still...)

Sam