Online UPS systems kick ass
July 30th, 2006
For almost a year and a half I’ve had one server, a Dell PowerEdge 800, randomly reboot itself with no warning in its syslog. The problem component is a CERC 6 channel SATA RAID card (from Dell) that is extremely sensitive to power supply fluctuations.
Even though it was connected to an APC UPS re-configured from its default to its most sensitive settings the server would end up rebooting, usually right after transferring on or off the UPS battery. This happened a lot due to the insane, and widely varying, load levels the rest of the (manufacturing) machinery in the building consumes.
Simply put, a server rebooting itself, especially without any notice, is unacceptable. I could not trust the machine. Just after this started happening, I put a scope on the machines input power and could see just how bad the power was. I also noted that I often only got email for the UPS battery kicking in, but never out since the machine would reboot before the monitoring software registered the status change and submitted the mail. So, knowing that there was nothing I could realistically do about the bad power situation, I said we should buy an online (double conversion) UPS. About 14 months later I finally got one. It kicks ass.
I installed the unit on Tuesday just before a mild thunderstorm that night and a really big one late Wednesday afternoon and evening. After an unknown amount of brownouts (the UPS will actually use input voltages between 65 and 138V to constantly charge its battery) and 9 complete blackouts (18 transfers, well really just losses of input power since output power is *always* off of the battery) the server was still going. This was a first, this server had never made it through a single thunderstorm without rebooting. Fantastic. If it keeps it up for three months or so, maybe I’ll start to trust it.
Of course, I probably should have thrown the server back at Dell in the first place since NONE of our other servers, workstations, or digital electronics on various machines have any problems as bad as this one server. If it wouldn’t be such a pain to transfer the load to another machine I probably would have. Oh well, at least that server and everything else I plugged into the online backup (a couple of switches, a Cisco router and Nortel Voicemail) should last a lot longer having nice clean power to live on.
Anyway, the online backup I got was a Tripp Lite SU1500RTXL2Ua. $799 US on their website. You should be able to get it for less than $900 in Canada… wholesale cost before shipping (it’s heavy) is about $750 CDN.
Entry Filed under: Technology
3 Comments Add your own
1. Brad | August 10th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Daryl,
I came across your site and noticed that you had a problem with your Dell server. I am contacting you to check the current status of the server. Please contact me back at the email address below and I will help you in any way that I can.
Brad
Dell Customer Advocate
customer_advocate@dell.com
2. Paul Jaikaran | September 5th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Daryl,
I have been in contact with Brad, who outlined your problem and directed be to this web post.
From the details provided here and to Brad, I think the Power Supply may not be operating optimally to handle power fluctuations and is causing system shutdowns.
I would like to arrange to replace the Power Supply in this system if you agree.
Please send me the following:
Address:
Phone #
Indicate if you would prefer to replace this yourself or I can send a Technician.
3. dos | September 8th, 2006 at 1:13 am
First, thanks to Brad and Paul for contacting me about this issue. Way better than phone support over a year ago who blamed the unsupported (by them) operating system before even taking a service tag number.
For those interested, after Brad’s post I emailed him with some more detailed info. 9 days later he replied letting me know that he was going to find someone to figure it out. 11 days after that Paul responded that he’d like to replace the power supply in the server and offered to have someone come replace it for me if I’d like. The next day I replied that he could ship it to me and that I’d install it. He shipped it that same afternoon and I received it the next day. I installed it the next day, Thursday, and shipped the old one back.
I don’t know, and probably will never really know, if replacing the power supply has resolved the problem since I’m going to leave the machine on the online UPS (I can’t afford anymore unscheduled downtime on this machine) but I’m certainly satisfied with the big improvement in Dell standing behind their product that I’ve experienced.
Thanks again Brad and Paul. I’ll be sticking with Dell machines for the foreseeable future, they seem to be holding up better than the other companies targeting corporate users, at least in our manufacturing environment.
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