Upgrade for a small office
Upgrade for a small office
(OP)
Hello,
I work in an office of about 100/150, we have 15/20 servers we manage in the server room, with about 5 various APC (and one triplite) products acting as UPSes for the servers.
The APC products we have now are of the Smart-UPS product line, 3 1500's and a 1400 I believe.
The servers are mostly the Dell PowerEdge 2U 2650/2850 Series, there are a few older boxes, too.
We want to buy a new UPS for the server room, and move the 3 1500's to our switch closets. The ultimate goal for the UPS in the server room is to provide enough time (a half hour to an hour) to get someone in here to shut down the servers gracefully in event of an emergency. We do not have any systems that absolutely need to stay up 24/7. I wouldn't mind having a few hours on the switch closets; but, I honestly don't know what kinda lifetime the 1500's will offer 4 or more switches.
Now, I have recently begun working here. And, I don't know that the current setup would provide the half hour or more we're looking for (we recently did a test, and systems survived about 15 minutes, but I think one UPS was about done).
I'm looking at the APC Smart-UPS XL line. I don't know if this is too much, or too little. I would like to go for a 2200VA or 3000VA with an additional battery unit. Adding more than one battery unit gets quite expensive and big, however. Rack mountable.
I work in an office of about 100/150, we have 15/20 servers we manage in the server room, with about 5 various APC (and one triplite) products acting as UPSes for the servers.
The APC products we have now are of the Smart-UPS product line, 3 1500's and a 1400 I believe.
The servers are mostly the Dell PowerEdge 2U 2650/2850 Series, there are a few older boxes, too.
We want to buy a new UPS for the server room, and move the 3 1500's to our switch closets. The ultimate goal for the UPS in the server room is to provide enough time (a half hour to an hour) to get someone in here to shut down the servers gracefully in event of an emergency. We do not have any systems that absolutely need to stay up 24/7. I wouldn't mind having a few hours on the switch closets; but, I honestly don't know what kinda lifetime the 1500's will offer 4 or more switches.
Now, I have recently begun working here. And, I don't know that the current setup would provide the half hour or more we're looking for (we recently did a test, and systems survived about 15 minutes, but I think one UPS was about done).
I'm looking at the APC Smart-UPS XL line. I don't know if this is too much, or too little. I would like to go for a 2200VA or 3000VA with an additional battery unit. Adding more than one battery unit gets quite expensive and big, however. Rack mountable.
RE: Upgrade for a small office
RE: Upgrade for a small office
There are one to three servers on the Smart-UPS 1500VAs; and, 4+ on the Smart-UPS 1400VA that almost lost it on last test. Typically the servers are dual processor Xeons with 4 or 5 harddrives.
I have used the APC utility. I believe the problem boils down to the fact that I do not know a lot about how this power stuff works. The 20Amp/circuit vs. 15Amp/circuit is very interesting; because, I don't know what that means... I'll get to researching more, now.
And, as you said, this stuff is big, heavy, and expensive. I don't want to over-order because of the site's calculations.
The multiple shutdowns that the Symmetra series offers is really nice... I'll have to price that out. It may be (if the price difference is large) that we will have to assume someone will physically get here before the power is drained, to shut down gracefully.
RE: Upgrade for a small office
I failed to see the easy answer right away. Check PowerChute on the UPSes I already have running to get the status from them. Averaged about 114 VAC per Smart-UPS 1500. Went to the APC UPS Selector page, choose select by load, added up all of my units and plugged it in.
Thanks guys.
RE: Upgrade for a small office
"Akwong" made a good recommendation in that you can go to APC's website, run there selector program and choose your brand, server model, specs, and quantity, etc... then choose how much uptime you want your servers to have, redundant solution y/n, rackmount or tower, then it spits out 3 options based on good, better, best recommendations. With that many servers, be prepared to look at high voltage UPS(s) and PDU(s).
RE: Upgrade for a small office
Second, with a consumption table (the one you will be able to create after the consumption measurements) you could decide the configuration (one UPS per rack, two or more medium-size UPSs attending several racks each one, or one big UPS for your entire server room), topology (single or multiple conversion UPSs), back-up time (looking at the running-time tables on each UPS model according to the actual load you are going to put on it) and any other characteristic you need to specify.
___________________________________
Joe
Electro-mechanic Engineering
jpm@ieee.org