rackmount managed PDUs

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

As much as I hate to tear people away from the Intercage/Atrivo debacle and semi-tangential rants, I'll take one for the team and do it :slight_smile:

I have an opportunity coming up to rebuild an existing machine room space to an extent. It's not a total gut-and-refit, but I'll at least get to put in some new infrastructure. That said, I'd be interested in hearing about peoples' experiences with various rackmountable managed PDUs.

I have some Tripp Lite PDUMH30NETs that work well and are reasonably priced, but they have a few quirks (no RS-232 console port, web interface seems to be a little shaky with Firefox, etc) that would become more annoying when scaled up to several rows of new rack footprints. I'm also open to using managed vertically mounted PDUs. The plan is for each footprint to have "A" and B" feeds, so two PDUMH30NETs would take up 4U per footprint, which is a bit much...

I don't need to worry about distributing DC power - just AC.

This site will be lights-out most of the time, so robust remote management capabilities are a must.

Any thoughts/insight are greatly appreciated.

jms

2

http://www.webpowerswitch.com/ I've used these quite a bit. Depending on the model you can get per port or per zone power management, and it sends alerts if it's not in the state it's supposed to be, and some of them can auto kickover things like routers if they suddenly cant route (might be dangerous, I don't use this one except at the CPE)

Andrew

Justin M. Streiner wrote:

3

APC makes "0U" units for different types of electric hand offs. AP7932 is a unit we've used with great success in the past. APC's SNMP access is great as well since it can be integrated with just about any kind of system.

--Matt

4

We use APANET powerswitches, and we are quite happy with them.

24 ports units, around 600 EUR per unit.

www.apanet.pl

5

We have a lot of APC managed power bars (zero U vertical, and 19" 1U
rackmount) and they work great. We SNMP manage them and access them via
web - they just work, and work well for our needs. Tripplite we've had
issues with over time, especially their UPS units (SNMP sucks on them).

Hope this helps a bit..

Take care,

Paul

6

the right url is http://www.apanet.pl/en/produkty_ippc24.html

cheers,
--nvieira

7

Justin M. Streiner wrote:

I have some Tripp Lite PDUMH30NETs that work well and are reasonably priced, but they have a few quirks (no RS-232 console port, web interface seems to be a little shaky with Firefox, etc) that would become more annoying when scaled up to several rows of new rack footprints. I'm also open to using managed vertically mounted PDUs. The plan is for each footprint to have "A" and B" feeds, so two PDUMH30NETs would take up 4U per footprint, which is a bit much...

One thing to be aware of with the vertical PDUs is where they get mounted. A number of vertical Emerson PDUs were purchased for our DC. However only one of the Liebert cabinets was purchased with the 6" extension on the rear. The PDUs mount on each side of the cabinet door frame with the receptacles facing the opposing PDU. Ie, both PDUs face inward towards each other, not towards the front or rear of the cabinet. They stick out about 2" plus the power cords stick out at least another 2", more depending on how hard you fight to force the power cables into bundles and wire-tie them off to the frame. The rails of the servers barely clear the PDUs. The cabling on the back of the servers is made all the harder by the bundle of power cables in the way. It's a difficult physical problem to work around. The 6" cabinet extension would have allowed the PDUs to be moved further from the servers and would have allowed for a little more robust form of wire management for the power cables.

Now in our CO we bought a cabinet thats 28" wide (Cooper/B-Line). There's enough space on each side for 4" of vertical wire management. Vertical PDUs would be viable in that scenario.

Just something to consider.
  Justin

PS==> The Emerson PDUs are supposed to be manageable, though I've never seen the GUI.

8

Good point. The cabinets we'd be using have 4" stand-offs between the rails and the cabinet frame, for wire management and they're fairly deep as well. Even at that, some servers seem to have obscenely deep foorprints - Dell PowerEdge 2850s come to mind :slight_smile:

I also have to wrestle with the wire management a bit, since some boxes have their network ports on the front and some have them on the back...

jms

9

We have a lot of APC managed power bars (zero U vertical, and 19" 1U
rackmount) and they work great. We SNMP manage them and access them via
web - they just work, and work well for our needs. Tripplite we've had
issues with over time, especially their UPS units (SNMP sucks on them).

I agree with this - we use APCs and the remote access is very useful.

Note that 20 Amp and below units use standard 110 Volts and you can just plug them in,
but the 40 Amp units (and I would presume above)
require 3 phase 220 volt power, and that generally requires a licensed electrician for installation.

Regards
Marshall

10

We've had lots of success with both APC and Baytech units. A lot of
the Baytech units ONLY have RS-232. Ditto on the mounting issues with
the vertical -- deeper and/or wider cabinets seem to reduce a lot of
the pain. On our next buildout we're looking at the Panduit CS1
cabinets which are both deeper and wider.

--D

11

I am a huge fan of the Avocent/Cyclades gear for its integration with the
serial console servers. They do grouping, and alerts over SNMP/SMS/email.
But the big seller for me is the integration.

12

Another vote for APC here. We've deployed many hundreds in various
receptacle configurations, and n'er any failures. The build quality
is definite cut above the competition, some with interiors that look
like they were assembled from duct tape and Radio Shack kits. :slight_smile:

As a word to the wise once you make it past the purchasing stage, the
software and IP stack is a bit fragile. No show-stoppers, mind you,
just some items here and there which underscore the need for a proper
management infrastructure and OSS.

(For starters, you'll want to make sure you're running the latest
firmware, as outlets and entire SNMP OID trees have been known to
'vanish' on earlier builds. Make sure they're ACLed tightly, as even
the smallest amount of stray packets or concurrent access will make
the unit unhappy. And if you need to provide "remote reboot"
functionality to customers, create your own interface, or consider one
the off-the-shelf solutions, Ubersmith DE being a popular choice,
given the above constraints...)

-a

13

I would like to register a strong vote against APC units. They are
quite fragile in our experience, to the point of 20% DOA on their 0U
managed units. Either the management console wouldn't work, or the
relays were stuck in one position (on or off). Real pain in the neck.
Their RS-232 port is RJ11 as well.

Baytech's however provide pretty much everything we want, and are
cheaper plus more reliable to boot! We only have experience with their
RS-232 models, but the interface is easily scripted, customizable
alarm threshold, and come out of the box ready to go. Our biggest
issue with them so far is a batch of them came in with the threshold
set to 12A instead of 16A.

Kelly

14

Another vote for APC here. We've deployed many hundreds in various
receptacle configurations, and n'er any failures. The build quality
is definite cut above the competition, some with interiors that look
like they were assembled from duct tape and Radio Shack kits. :slight_smile:

As a word to the wise once you make it past the purchasing stage, the
software and IP stack is a bit fragile. No show-stoppers, mind you,
just some items here and there which underscore the need for a proper
management infrastructure and OSS.

We've had issues with their code being fragile, failing to respond at times. Most recently, one of our AP7932's decided someone else was using the web interface and would not let me log in. Fortunately, I was simply checking on power consumption, not trying to reboot something. But it reminded me of a serious shortcoming. You can add user accounts so specific people can power cycle only their stuff, but the web interface appears to be limited to one user at a time, not very helpful.

I'll probably wind up connecting the serial ports to a terminal server to ensure access (serial port seemed to still work when web, telnet and ssh refused the login). And we're looking at other brands as options for future deployments. Would be interested in hearing from folks who've tried the newest Raritan power stuff.

(For starters, you'll want to make sure you're running the latest
firmware, as outlets and entire SNMP OID trees have been known to
'vanish' on earlier builds. Make sure they're ACLed tightly, as even
the smallest amount of stray packets or concurrent access will make
the unit unhappy. And if you need to provide "remote reboot"
functionality to customers, create your own interface, or consider one
the off-the-shelf solutions, Ubersmith DE being a popular choice,
given the above constraints...)

Ah, so yep, I see you've confirmed that concurrent access is a total non-starter with these, as I had guessed. Nice products, but agree their IP interfaces are lacking. And yes, you can hide them behind other software, just too bad you have to.

Dan

15

I've pretty much completely sworn off 0U/Vertical PDUs.[1] In my experience, unless you're able to have on-hand, prior to cutting checks, all of the following: sample cabinets, sample servers, sample PDUs, you will NOT end up with a combo that doesn't suck in some fashion. Whether it's PDUs that block access to rear rails (as APC's 0Us do, even in their own cabinets), or PDUs which have their supply cables come out of the PDU horizontally, blocking access to whole portions of the rear of the cabinet (as the HP 3-phase 208V60A PDUs do if used in anything other than the specially crafted HP cabinets). Never again.

To be honest, we made the decision simply to dedicate 4U (and 2U of horizontal cable-management) to our cabinet PDUs, and it's a decision I don't regret.

Cheers,
D

[1] http://blog.megacity.org/archives/2008/03/0u-pdus/

16

I have loved the Raritan 0U PDU's. Granted, we use APC Netshelter SX in
our DC, but these work well with both APC PDU's and Raritan PX-PDU's.

http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=AR7710

- --

Adam Kennedy
Senior Network Administrator
Cyberlink Technologies, Inc.
Phone: 888-293-3693
Fax: 574-855-5761