It's not crazy, it's just not reasonable. What I mean, of course, is that in a collocation model, where you have customers bringing in computers, it is not reasonable to mandate that they use DC power. You'd have no customers. Which, in turn, may be a benefit, since you wouldn't need the power system in the first place. On Thu, 29 May 2003, Dan Armstrong wrote:

I agree, of course it is ludicrous to think otherwise.

It has always bothered me that we rectify AC power to store it in batteries, then re-invert it to power AC servers only for them to rectify it again....

Dan.

"Tom (UnitedLayer)" wrote:

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Or we could all take a page from the book of telecom, and run with DC systems.

It'd be nice to be able to tell our customers: "Oh hey, you can only use DC power supplies, so you'll need to change out all of the power supplies in your 1U's, Sun Boxes/etc"

Yes, I have run an installation of servers that were all DC, and it was neat, but hardwiring everything was not an exciting task. It was also hard to find people who were experienced with DC. Most sysadmins have never worked with DC, and the process of pulling a fuse, unscrewing some terminals/etc/etc before working on gear isn't always remembered.

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If only the equipment manufacturers would stop gauging on price for DC equipment/power supplies.

Amen! You'd think there might actually be less components in the things :)

-- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex@nac.net, latency, Al Reuben -- -- Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net --