From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>

They may hate to give out this information, but any piece of equipment with a NEBS level 3 rating already has this information. I'm not asking for vendors to do the full, burn the box, NEBS testing. But having the power drain data sheet would be very useful.

This is really a customer demand issue. If customers started demanding vendors supply a full NEBS-like space and power planning data sheet, we would get the information. But customers don't, so we don't.

I suspect the availability of data is not the only/key issue here. If pressed (asked correctly, etc.), most vendors can provide some approximation of worst case system or per-subsystem current requirements, whether they have done/can spell NEBS or not. Even though it is non-trivial to measure instantaneous peak drain empirically, there are other ways to get reasonable bounds on it, and doing so is a routine practice of hardware engineers. A reason that the most careful power capacity forecasts (in particular) may *seem* to be perpetually optimistic, might be the needlessly high peak to average drain ratio of (most?) equipment. If customers can convince vendors that they have more concern about the ancillary costs of operating equipment, vendors might be induced (pun!) to make some nominal sacrifices in cost and MTBF to include features like inrush current limiting, and sequencing. Get your RFPs ready. Regards, Andrew Bender taqua.com