Well, a little bit of spring break, and then catching up. Monday I spent most of the day researching APC racks and UPSen for the machine room expansion.
It looks like the top of the line NetShelter racks are pretty much standard, and that’s actually the model that we already have, so getting four more of them won’t be a problem. The Smart-UPS RT seems to be the UPS we want to go for — it’s a double conversion online rather than line interactive, which is a step up from any of the other Smart-UPS models. The Symmetra line is very attractive with its redundancy options, but at a higher cost, more rack space, and lower kVA output, I think we can be better served by the Smart-UPS (particularly with a generator and an automatic transfer switch, which comes in relatively inexpensively).
One of the tricky bits is that it’s apparently ill-advised (to the point of not being possible) to connect a UPS unit with greater than 5kVA to the power source with a plug — you have to hardwire it. For general ease, I therefore limited the discussion to the 5kVA Smart-UPS units, which at one per rack would give us a total of 20kVA power in the rack system.
Posted by Rowan Littell at March 30, 2005 08:55 PM