Mike, I suggest that you may be using the wrong efficiency measurement. I prefer to measure Customer Service and Satisfaction for effort and dollars expended. Customers with small to medium needs as you describe could use (customer serviceable) 600VA to 1500VA units to power the loads you described. Calendar entries for battery replacement and training customer to understand alert sounds are appropriate for this customer description. Norbert Weiner recommends optimizing humans over hardware. - James R. Cutler james.cutler@consultant.com (Top poster because that is Apple Mail default, Real engineers use defaults where possible to leave time for real work.)
On Apr 6, 2025, at 2:55 PM, Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> 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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