> From: Edward Ned Harvey [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2011 9:29 AM > > If you get the enterprise product, you know what you're getting, and that's > why you're paying. > > If you get the "comfort" product, it's a calculated risk. > > Either way it's a calculated risk. Enterprise products fail too. The failure rate > on cheaper products is higher.
Not directly related to AC, here are a couple of anecdotes: I once inherited an IT room where the previous guy had installed Tripplite UPS's. I had already been in the habit of buying APC Smartups, and I wasn't pleased with the tripplite, so I went and looked up all their specs and scrutinized them. But I couldn't find anything wrong, so I couldn't press the issue. One day, one of the UPS's failed. So the machines with redundant power started drawing all their power from the other side, overloaded the other UPS, and it failed too. I tested this after the fact, and found that those tripplite UPS's, when they exceed their rated power draw, they simply shut down. Whereas the Smartups, when they exceed their rated load, they simply provide power from the wall, and start sounding an "overload" alarm. Also, when the batteries fail someday, in the smartups, you can hotswap the batteries, while in the tripplite, you couldn't. I took this as a learning experience, and later at a different company... I saw they had also bought a cheap UPS. So I told the above story and convinced the company to replace those UPS's. We scheduled a maintenance window (some of the equipment didn't have redundant power). I bought the smartups, plugged it in at my desk, charged the batteries. Then during the maintenance window, I put it in the closet, plugged it into the wall power, and it immediately caught fire and exploded. Naturally, APC bent over backwards to apologize and overnight me a (heavy) replacement unit from the other side of the country. The shiipping alone must have cost them something on-par with the cost of the unit. But they didn't want me to spread the story. ;-) It just goes to show, everything fails. It's all a calculated probability and nothing more. Occasionally though somebody else's experience and sometimes through your own experience, you can identify specific failure modes to watch out for... But most of them are precisely the sort of thing nobody would ever think of. (Such as the need to press the power button to restore AC after a power interruption.) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
