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 -----Original Message----- From: Andrew D Kirch [mailto:trelane@trelane.net] Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 12:41 PM Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: rackmount managed PDUs 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:

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 :)

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

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and contains confidential and/or privileged material. If you received this in error, please contact the sender immediately and then destroy this transmission, including all attachments, without copying, distributing or disclosing same. Thank you."

the right url is http://www.apanet.pl/en/produkty_ippc24.html cheers, --nvieira ----- "Nuno Vieira - nfsi telecom" <nuno.vieira@nfsi.pt> wrote:

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

24 ports units, around 600 EUR per unit.

www.apanet.pl --- Nuno Vieira nfsi telecom, lda.

nuno.vieira@nfsi.pt Tel. (+351) 21 949 2300 - Fax (+351) 21 949 2301 http://www.nfsi.pt/

----- "Justin M. Streiner" <streiner@cluebyfour.org> wrote:

...

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 :)

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

On Thu, 25 Sep 2008, Justin Shore wrote:

One thing to be aware of with the vertical PDUs is where they get mounted.

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 :) 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

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. On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 10:40 AM, Duane Waddle <duane.waddle@gmail.com>wrote:

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Justin Shore <justin@justinshore.com> wrote:

...

Justin M. Streiner wrote:

One thing to be aware of with the vertical PDUs is where they get

mounted.

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

-- - Mike Smiley - smiley@zo.com - http://www.mikies.net

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...

I'll second the vote for APC, they make a flexible variety of products that all "feel" the same, but support widely varying configurations.

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.

We've used a very successful similar configuration where an extra set of vertical mounting rails is used at the very back of the rack *just* for purposes of mounting the 0U strips. Most people usually dismiss this sort of configuration as impractical due to the increased difficulty of accessing rack screws for the backs of the servers. We have a "long bit" that we use with our power screwdrivers, it's 21" long and basically slides thru right behind the 0U strip. Rack ends up looking something like this, from-the-top view: http://www.sol.net/tmp/nanog/rack.gif Extra set of vertical rails (vertical rails in red) in the rear. To them is attached, up to two per side, 0U PDU's. Outlets face each other, which is not *great* from an airflow reduction point of view. We use cable lacing strips (blue) in between the rear rail sets. We're a velcro shop and this works out pretty well for us. For those times you need to get at the screws in the first rear set of rails that are holding a server, you can stick your "long bit" or an offset screwdriver in, because of course the set of rails holding the PDU's is square holed, and the only holes obstructed are the ones holding the 0U PDU's. The main advantage of this over the quoted suggestion would be that it sounds like the quoted suggestion is a hard mount to the rack, which probably obstructs screw access, and may only allow one strip per side, depending. Of course, all of this makes various assumptions about the available geometries. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.

At 06:13 PM 9/25/2008, Adam Rothschild wrote:

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. :-)

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

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkjiQ+sACgkQJXrxMJHscbJY+ACcC90F8iqMXkCYexoMdNGAcHV7 e+gAoNtOkJYwO8PF9FmXqdmK0E7OGkOe =dr98 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----