Not trying to hijack your sourcing/design discussion but: In your maintainability calculation, you also need to think about battery replacement/maintenance/repair. You are going to need to roll a truck to every location every few years to replace batteries. Who pays for that? If your service fails during a power outage due to a bad battery you have to explain that. What is your SLA on battery runtime? What happens if you roll a truck and the customer has a blown circuit breaker? Alarm companies have two different battles: Cellular technology upgrades and battery replacement cycles. Often they have to eat the cellular upgrades (Like 2G and 3G sunsets, and at some point 4G will happen) Since monitoring depends on the cellular radio. They can roll that into a contract renewal like “Sign a two year renewal contract and we will replace ‘Your’ cellular radio for free”, other wise, your system will not be monitored after this date. I have seem some alarm companies offer to sell you the batteries (or you can probably source them online) and you swap it out yourself, or they charge for a service call and bill you for the battery as part of that. Just something to think about if you haven’t already done so! Hope this helps G On 6 Apr 2025, at 13:55, Mike Hammett via NANOG wrote:
I'm trying to find something that keeps my customer's network gear online for a meaningful amount of time. The challenge is that an ONT, firewall, switch, AP, and some IP phones doesn't add up to be very much load. Most normal UPSes get terribly inefficient at lower load ratings. Add up all of the network devices a customer may have and we rarely break 50 watts of load. Normal, small UPSes are lucky to break 50% efficiency at those loads whereas they may be 95% efficient at say 100 or 200 watts. Get a bigger unit with a bigger battery and now you're even less efficient. Get a big enough unit to have extendable batteries and now you're spending thousands of dollars for such a small request.
I've gone asking, but haven't really gotten anywhere. The best technical solution was from some electronics parts nerds that was basically to build my own small rectifier and battery system. Great. I can achieve high efficiencies with small loads, letting me have say 4 or 8 hours of battery. However, I've got a science project, not something I can deploy at a customer.
I'm hoping one of you has the magic bullet in what product a service provider should use in this scenario.
Oh, and of course, being able to centrally manage them from my own iron would be great too. :-)
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com
Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com
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