Re: Co-lo's and power
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On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 14:26:36 -0700
Joe Emenaker <joe@emenaker.com> wrote:
> Jacob S wrote:
> > However, most of the Co-lo's we have seen indicate that each rack is
> > only fed with a 15 - 20A power line... to power the entire 42U of
> > space. We have about six 1U servers currently and half of them are
> > dual-P4 machines, all of them 2.8Ghz or faster. Add in a switch and
> > remote kvm and we were under the impression we would need our own
> > 15A line dedicated to our servers. But at least one Co-lo has said
> > it would cost a one time fee of $1100 to get a dedicated 15A power
> > line run to our servers in their rack.
> Well, I haven't had this particular problem, but I'll mention a few
> things that come to mind.
> 1 - Do you share the rack with other customers?
Yes, the rack is shared with other customers.
> If so, what happens
> when they add your machines and it puts the rack over their max power
> draw? They'll have multiple pissed-off customers on their hands. If
> they don't want to lose them all, the co-lo will be pretty motivated
> to fix the problem themselves. So, I think that $1,100 fee is subject
> to a little brinkmanship. :)
That was my thought as well, but of course they'll only say that
they'll reset the breaker when we call about our servers being down.
And we can't afford to jump co-los very often because of the logistics
involved, so we hate to rely on them fixing the situation before it
kills us.
> 2 - 15A for a fully-populated 42U seems quite low to me. I doubt that
> they're maxing out each rack. If so, then they might be willing to
> put some of your machines on a second rack (although you've probably
> looked into this).
They won't do this for us unless 1) our current rack is full when we
need more servers added, or 2) we provide a 2nd network switch (and
we would need a 2nd kvm, as they don't like cables stretching between
racks).
> > So, my question to the list is, do we really need that much power
> > for our servers?
> Go to Home Depot and buy something called a "Kill-A-Watt". I love
> mine. You plug it into the wall and plug other things into and it
> tells you the supply voltage, frequency, wattage consumed, total kWh
> consumed, VA, power-factor, supply current, etc. This way, you can
> find out exactly how many amps each machine is pulling.
Good tip. Thanks.
Jacob
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