Submitted by Rick James

Recently we’ve been moving physical servers from Voter to Carr Hall. This is because we have exhausted our battery backup units in Voter and need to reduce the load to prepare for the arrival of new storage arrays. In all of our computer rooms (Voter -2, Library, and Carr) we have Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS’s) that provide power in the event of a utility outage. The UPS provides power until the computer room generator starts and begins supplying electricity. This entire sequence takes about 10 seconds from start to finish. The current UPS units were installed about 12 years ago and have been very reliable. As we have added new servers and network equipment, the load has steadily increased. The latest generation of servers consume 3-4 times the power than the earlier generation servers did. More CPU’s, more memory, more network cards all add up.