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Power Distribution in a Datacenter?
d00dman asks: "I work for a colocation reseller. We don't own our datacenter, we lease cage space and with it we get an array of 30amp and 15amp power circuits. My problem is, inside of the cage we need to do our own power distribution. We have around 50 hosts in the facility, and are growing quickly. We need to add another 20 or so hosts in coming month. We are looking for a simple, scalable, and even power distribution method. As always, money IS an object. Right now we have a group of UPS's with power strips plugged into each. While this was sufficient for as many as 30 hosts, its starting to become a bit of a mess. Does anyone have any advice to offer...any creative tricks?"
Get a 220v APC UPS with a PDU. Run a fewBaytech RPC2s out of the APC PDU.
Doing this myself actually.
Get paid to code OSS
- Convert incoming power (whatever form) to 42VDC.
- Have a big bank of batteries charged by the 42 VDC.
- Run all your equipment from power cables attached to big copper busbars with 42V between them.
Advantages: you get rid of your UPS's, you have a very scalable power system (telcos never unplug anything!), lots of big manly metal things.Disadvantage: dropping a wrench across the 42V busbars is a bad thing
If you don't have access to a lot of surplus rackmount PC's with 42VDC-in power supplies and are really on a budget, do it with 12VDC instead and use these servers that run off 12V very nicely.
If you're looking for something affordable as well as easily scalable, it might be easiest to just pickup some 4u rackmount UPS units from APC or BestPower and install one in each rack. There is usually a separate circuit to each rack anyway. For a few hundred bucks, you get enough conditioned power for a full rack of equipment IN EACH RACK, and you also gain the ability to remotely control and monitor power to each device that is plugged into it. If you're going to spend $1-2k per cabinet anyway, what's another $400 for power.
What you want is PDU. Here's how hard it is find one:q =%22power+distribution+unit%22&btnG=Google+Sea rch
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&
I personally would not buy from APC. I've had more server failures due to APC UPSs shutting off the power output than I would have had with power failures. Our power company is more dependable than APC. Small UPSs are banned here.
Take a look at .
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Every major data center that I have worked with provides clean reliable power. They all have whole-building surge surpression, backup generators, UPS systems of one type or another. I have not even FOUND a data center that did NOT provide UPS type funtionality.
In fact, I solicited bids for housing ~300 servers a couple years ago from 12 different data centers and EVERY SINGLE ONE had backup power. These include Frontier Global center (before Exodus bought them) Exodus, MCI, Level 3, Globix, Equinix, AT&T, Best, Netcom, AboveNet, GTE, the list goes on.
If your datacenter provides such shit power that you need your own UPS, DUMP THEM NOW. They SUCK. You are NOT getting your money's worth. FWIW, I've also built 6 data centers. You REALLY don't want a bunch of little UPS's all over the place. They aren't very good anyway. Depending on your uptime requirements, get your self one (or two) BIG UPS system. They come in all sizes. Best has some that go to 220kVA even. I bet a 15kVA would do ya though.