Brian Mathis wrote: > You need to think like a businessman, not a techie. The techie wants > to figure out a technical solution to prevent people from doing > something, while the businessman charges a penalty fee if someone uses > more than they're supposed to. > > Using a fee has a bunch of advantages: > - You get more money if people go over > - It costs you almost nothing in time or effort to implement (as far > as engineering a solution). You just need to have the monitoring > system setup. > - It places the burden on your customers to stay in line, instead of you > - It allows you to make more efficient use of your power resources > since you don't have to rigidly divide them up among customers. > - We live in a capitalist society. Capitalism is not about greed, > it's about using financial incentives/disincentives to steer people in > the direction you want them to go, instead of forcing them. > > It does put you at some risk, and the amount of the overage fee should > be proportional to that risk.
All of our in-house datacenters use metered power strips similar to these: http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/813705/Tripp-Lite-Metered-PDU-PDUMH20-power/?cm_mmc=Mercent-_-Google-_-Cables_Surge_and_Power_Protection-_-813705&utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=plusbox-beta&mr:trackingCode=B56E3671-5121-DF11-9B13-0019B9C043EB&mr:referralID=NA We use them to ensue that we don't exceed a certain percentage of the circuit rating. You could use them to split a 15 amp circuit into any number of circuits and limit or charge for usage based on monitoring, instead of popping a breaker. There are remotely monitorable equivalents, I'm sure. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
