are UPS necessary for servers?

[thespeakerbox]

what advantages comes with having a UPS? They only keep power for 10 minutes or so? So why have one?

 

[JE78]

I guess it depends on what you have the server and what the sever runs. It does alot more than keeps power for 10 mins. It protects aginst brown outs, spikes and allows you to save info if the electric goes out. If I had a server with important information on it I'd have UPS hooked up to it.

 

[kevnich2]

Some higher UPS's keep power for 70 minutes and up, the main thing they help against is like JE78 said, if you have an electrical spike or brown out, the server will stay up for that short period of time until power regulates again. if there is a complete outage, it'll give you time to shut it down properly.

 

[thespeakerbox]

I have a dell poweredge 2550. How do i know what model and brand to get ? any suggestions? Im just looking to connect the router, monitor , and server up to it.

 

[mustap]

i have seen a thread in which a belkin ups appeared to be very good (about 1100-1200va rating i dont remember)at a very reasonable price.check it out.

 

[cmetz]

thespeakerbox, the power is typically out for less than a second (a blip), a few minutes, or a long time. An UPS lets you keep on going through the first two scenarios, and shut down gracefully in the third so you shouldn't get filesystem damage.

I suggest APC UPSs. It's not that I think they're the best, as much as I think most others are a lot worse. If cost is an issue, there are a lot of good APC refurbishers around the 'net, and a refurbed APC Smart-UPS is a lot better than a Belkin or Tripp-Lite or no-name. I've run into both Belkin and Tripp-Lite rather spontaneously catching on fire.

(My favorite is Best Power, but they got bought and became even harder to buy, and still expensive.)

 

[skyking]

It really depends on the Operating system you are using. If it is windows-based, then any one that comes with shutdown software and a cable will do. The big deal is the graceful shutdown. Databases are not too forgiving of getting shut down in the middle of a write operation.

If it is linux or unix, I would suggest using an APC brand. I have a freebsd server hooked up to one with apcups, and it works fine. I don't think all brands have a ported utility though.
Added: If you have no other reason to put USB in your kernel, then be sure to get one with a DB9 serial connection. It was not too bad to set up.

 

[thespeakerbox]

Anyone know where i can get some good prices on an ups by apc

 

[freebsdrules]

ebay is a good place to start. i also may be selling an APC Smart-UPS 700 if you're interested (450watts). It's rack-mount however (3U) so not sure if you could use it. Email me at: pschied AT sas DOT upenn.edu if interested.

 

[cmetz]

For a refurb, google for "reburbished ups." I'd take a refurb smart-UPS over a no-name new one.
For new, check the Hot Deals forum. Also check Sam's Club and Micro Center if you have any nearby.

 

[thespeakerbox]

Whats a good model to get ? Do they have a number of watts output, or better yet, whats measures how good each of them are?

 

[Nothinman]

Smaller UPSes aren't that expensive. I have a pair of APC 800s and each on was under $150 IIRC. I have them for my home boxes because my power sucks, I get 1-5min power outages often enough and it keeps out spikes and crap, I've already lost some components to dirty power so it's worth it right there for me.

For a real, business server there's no question. If you don't have some sort of UPS, battery backup, generator, etc you're an idiot. Just think about how much fun it'll be looking for a replacement powersupply or motherboard after lightning strikes nearby one night. Don't tell me, you have custom built, no-name servers, too?

 

[stash]

Even if a UPS only kept a server up for 10 additional minutes, that can be extremely critical. For small networks, it would give you a chance to gracefully power down the machine. On larger networks, the UPS often is used to keep things going until the generator comes online, in addition to smoothing out the current going to the server.

Don't tell me, you have custom built, no-name servers, too?

He said he had a Dell PE

 

[Nothinman]

He said he had a Dell PE

Ah ok, I see that now. Although considering the luck we had with Dell's hardware and support I'm not sure that's a whole lot better.

 

[WiseOldDude]

ABSOULTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Without going into a lot of detail about the architecture of a NOS, they often have a lot of unsaved files in RAM memory that has not been written to disk yet. This is done so that the server can respond to requests from clients immediately, and the 'housekeeping' tasks such as writing/verifying files back to disk can be done when the workload allows time.

It is imperatively that the NOS be allowed to do an orderly shutdown by saving and closing all the open/unsaved files.

Without even a flicker of the lights can crash a server, and loose or corrupt the data on it.

 

[Nothinman]

Not to take the wind out of your sails, but the same is true of any OS otherwise they would run 10x slower than they do now. With a fileserver it's a little worse because more people are affected if things are lost but if the power goes out in your building and everyone's workstation goes with it there will probably be just as many lost files on workstations as there are on the file servers if the datacenter loses power.

 

[thespeakerbox]

Can anyone recommend a UPS solution ?

 

[WiseOldDude]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Not to take the wind out of your sails, but the same is true of any OS otherwise they would run 10x slower than they do now. With a fileserver it's a little worse because more people are affected if things are lost but if the power goes out in your building and everyone's workstation goes with it there will probably be just as many lost files on workstations as there are on the file servers if the datacenter loses power.

Well the wind is not taken out of my sails, because while you are correct that a desktop OS will cache a file before writing it to disk, it usually happens immediately because there is only one user logged on. Hundreds of users can be logged into a server.

Database files are open only on a server, and transactions must be complete or rolled back to a known state, the function of NOS's not desktop OS's.

 

[WiseOldDude]

Originally posted by: thespeakerbox
Can anyone recommend a UPS solution ?

APC is the brand I use, there are others. There is no "one size fits all" but anything is better than nothing.

You are aware that servers/PC's can communicate with UPS's and configured to do a shutdown of the server when the power outage lasts longer than a few minutes, or what ever value you configure.

 

[skyking]

Originally posted by: thespeakerbox
Can anyone recommend a UPS solution ?

I'd go with a serial connector equipped APC, either the smartUPs or backUPS series.

here is a link to some freebsd info.
The apcupsd stuff.

 

[Nothinman]

Well the wind is not taken out of my sails, because while you are correct that a desktop OS will cache a file before writing it to disk, it usually happens immediately because there is only one user logged on. Hundreds of users can be logged into a server.

It really depends on what is going on, in this machine right now I have ~280M being used by the filesystem cache. In an office setting it's even worse because Word, Excel, etc all suck and can lose data really easily even with autosave enabled.

Database files are open only on a server, and transactions must be complete or rolled back to a known state, the function of NOS's not desktop OS's.

That's a completely different scenario though. Databases have their own caching system that's seperate from the OS's file caching and that's what makes them more suseptible to data loss.

And I really hate the term NOS, name an OS these days that doesn't come with networking components?

 

[WiseOldDude]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

And I really hate the term NOS, name an OS these days that doesn't come with networking components?

And one can be correct calling a small pickup or a 24 foot tall dumptruck under the generic "truck", which they both are. Their capabilities are vastly different, as is a true NOS designed to have hundreds of concurrent users or a desktop OS with only one concurrent user.

 

[Nothinman]

And one can be correct calling a small pickup or a 24 foot tall dumptruck under the generic "truck", which they both are. Their capabilities are vastly different, as is a true NOS designed to have hundreds of concurrent users or a desktop OS with only one concurrent user.

I think the only OS that has that much work put into being a network fileserver is NetWare and IMO NetWare is dead. We still use it where I work, but even Novell is starting to bet on Linux these days. My desktops and servers are all Linux, there's no difference in the software's design on either of them.

 

[Tazanator]

to answer the quick cheap and easy way .. get a small 500watt APC use the power control software to net broadcast shutdowns than buy an old no name monster UPS (I got an old radio shack 500Watt - it's the same as an APC 1250VA and lets the server shut down after the 500 watt tells it to. this gives me modern features and large run times cheap.