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  1. #1

    Colocate - Redundant Power Supply

    How important is a redundant power supply?
    Are they prone to failure? This will be a new server....

  2. #2
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    That also depends on the make and model of the PSU. If you bought a dirt-cheap no-namer, I wouldn't trust it, but a reliable antec? Should be fine in that case, but it doesn't hurt to have spare parts available ASAP.
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  3. #3
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    There's the additional wiring to consider (unless you get one with a Y cable), as well. But I've never had a reliable PSU die on me. It's always the no-name brands that do it.

    The basic question you should be asking is how much downtime can you afford? Chances are it's going to be more than you think. Even if Google or Amazon was down for an hour, yes it would be a big deal, but it wouldn't be something we'd be looking back on a year later and wouldn't have an impact on their financials, realistically. I'd just stick to a single PSU and have a spare on hand to swap out if you're really worried about it.
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  4. #4
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    Getting a name-brand PSU is probably good enough for this. For us, Dell's PSU seems to be pretty decent and we never had one that failed on us. We do have machines that has 2 PSU in them, but generally speaking, they are more trouble then benefit with the Y adapters going into the cramp up APC.

    The only benefit I see with the 2 PSU thing is if you will take power from both A and B.
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  5. #5
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    Although power supplies do fail, a good quality PSU has a much lower chance of failure. In a rack full of 1U servers, you might have just a couple power supply failures within a period of a few years.

    We use redundant power supplies in our servers, but not to protect against power supply failure. We actually do it so that we can connect the supplies to seperate power circuits, which allows us to do power maintenance on one circuit at a time without having to shut down the servers. As a side benefit, we get a very high level of power redundancy in our racks.
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  6. #6
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    If you can afford it, I would say go with a redundant PSU system because it alleviates one other single point of failure. But like the others said, if this server isn't doing much, then as long as you get a quality brand PSU, you will be fine. I always err on the side of caution and get 2 for all our shared servers.

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  7. #7
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    "redundant power supply", is very important, this is something that is WORTH spening a few extra buck.

  8. #8
    I strongly believe redundant power supplies should be an industry standard.

    It is true that a good quality power supply rarely fails, but add to it the possibility of a breaker being tripped in the DC, a UPS unit boinking, or any other small failure and you are sitting on a timebomb.

    Its just one more thing easily done to prevent downtime.
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  9. #9
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    I have seen a PSU die. It was on a horribly expensive top-end Intergraph machine, a quad-CPU tower box with more slots for RAM than I've ever seen before! (36 slots or so)

    It had a redundant PSU, but the box kept going (but with the alarm beeping away) when one of the units failed.

    Of course, this was a quad-CPU Pentium Pro machine, each running at 200Mhz and could be described as a little bit on the old side, but the moral is that even the best will fail eventually.

    On the other hand, you could just buy a top-quality spare unit, and wait 11 years for it to fail, unless you're just unlucky

  10. #10
    It's worth having one around as a spare. By the time you need it they won't make it anymore. I've had 2 fail in five years, on 20 servers. They don't take long to replace, and its pretty easy to tell when they go bad.

  11. #11
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    Redundant power supplies are definitely a worthwhile investment. One of the gotchas with them however is using any sort of power-cycling remote reboot equipment. From experience, cutting the power to one outlet isn't going to restart the server, and most of these devices won't handle grouping outlets... pulling the plug is never a good idea anyway if you can avoid it, but I digress...

    Power supplies tend to "die" under high-load... meaning when you need them most... right after your site has been digged or featured on CNN or whatever your favorite server-killing referrer may be.
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  12. #12
    At our facility each cabinet is equiped with two circuits from independant power sources (diff. grids) so our customers will plug one power supply into one circuit and the other into the other. This way they're covered if they lose a PSU or if we lose power.
    I guess it depends on your uptime needs.

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  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rick_Prendergast
    At our facility each cabinet is equiped with two circuits from independant power sources (diff. grids) so our customers will plug one power supply into one circuit and the other into the other. This way they're covered if they lose a PSU or if we lose power.
    I guess it depends on your uptime needs.

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    That only works if each circuit can satisfy the power need of all the equipment by itself.

    Otherwise, if one circuit fails, the other one will overload.

  14. #14
    This is true, which is why we limit load on each circuit to under 10Amps. We monitor the load on each circuit remotely with BCMS and are able to notify the customer when they reach a critical point.
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  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rick_Prendergast
    This is true, which is why we limit load on each circuit to under 10Amps. We monitor the load on each circuit remotely with BCMS and are able to notify the customer when they reach a critical point.
    Essentially, you are paying for 20A but uses under 10A. Given the high price of power these days, I have to ask - has this system ever kicked in?

  16. #16
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    For running two separate circuits into your cabinet... yes, you are paying for more power than you need on average. But, as was stated earlier, it depends on your up-time needs.

    It also depends on where your true concern lies... is it with one of the power circuits cutting out (hence you'd be wise to have two separate circuits in your cabinet, with one redundant PSU on each), or is it on the power supplies themselves (hence two separate circuits might be overkill, and using both redundant PSU's on the same circuit will help alleviate your concern).
    Cory von Wallenstein, Dynamic Network Services Inc.
    My team and I spent the last few months putting together the DynDNS Spring Server VPS platform for folks needing IPv4 and IPv6 Linux servers on Xen. Would love feedback, both good and bad!

  17. #17
    By "kicked in" do you mean have we ever lost one side of the power, no.
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