-1

I'm confused. Why are UPS units installed in racks (usually in the bottom of the rack) with many thousand of dollars worth of servers; switches and other electronics with sulfuric acid fumes being pulled thru them with the fans? This seems wrong. I know proper battery maintenance and all that and we still get boiled dry and busted/warp battery packs. Green terminals all over the place. Does this bother anyone else or am I being over the top here. I'm not seeing the UPS being kept in a separate area being addressed? bjr

3 Answers 3

1

Feel free to stack UPS separately. Possibly in a battery room, but maybe not for a small number of rack mount units. And keep everything maintained.

0

It very much depends on your needs. If you have enough requirement for UPS that you're concerned about this kind of thing then you can set up a physically separate power cabinet, or even a whole room that's ventilated differently from the server room (I've done this). But other than that, I would say most small offices that have a simple 4u (or so) UPS in the bottom of each of the two racks that serve their whole business probably don't have to worry too much.

Also consider this is ultimately a cost vs risk issue. The cost/risk return of mixing the UPS in the same rack with the rest of your equipment may well make more sense than the cost/risk of doing anything else more elaborate.

1
  • I just type out a reply thanking every one and then log in and it deleted all my effort, so I'll just say thankyou. We've definitely got environmental issues (heat) but the manage seems fine with the casualties we suffer. (Why is that a problem now!! ) seems to be the standard response.bjr
    – bjr
    Oct 31, 2020 at 15:50
0

I've addressed this in the past by keeping batteries in separate airflow domains, both by using differing rack/pods and maintaining battery/generator room(s).

Of the two, I had better experiences scaling them separately. If you're at the scale that a battery room or pod for multiple racks make sense, it wouldn't be a bad idea. This way, you can get much larger batteries that service machines in less granular failure domains (like a few per "pod" or rack(s)) and save a lot more money than you would maintaining a ton of individual units that rip up tiny batteries.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .