Connecting RX3600 to an APC3000 UPS

[CJENSEN_1]

Hello Gurus,
We will be purchasing an RX3600, running HPUX 11.31. We are wondering if this can be hooked up to an existing APC3000 UPS that is in our datacenter. The APC3000 does have a rs-232 cable. Will the RX3600 upsmond daemon be able to determine a power outage, and do a system shutdown, accordingly? Or, should we go with the "PowerTrust" UPS's?
Thanks...colin

[Bill Hassell]

There are no standards for UPS products including very non-standard serial cables. Most all UPS manufacturers focus on x86 platforms with GUIs. The question is 100% UPS manufacturer. HP-UX support for UPS models such as the R3000 (aka Compaq) is quite lacking -- their download site for LanSafe software has broken links and if you manage to find the working download button, the software fails to install with several error messages.

APC provides some Javajunk to monitor the (optional) APC LAN interface but nothing for the serial port. Based on experiences with other UPS manufacturers, standard serial cables (null modem or straight through) don't work either -- you have to use the manufacturer's special cable.

For reliable shutdown prior to UPS battery exhaustion, I would only use an HP supported UPS and verify that it can actually communicate with the UPS daemon. Or use another box (Windows? Linux?) that does indeed communicate successfully with the APC box and when it's time to shutdown, setup an ssh command to trigger an orderly shutdown on the HP-UX box. And test when it is safe to do so. Don't wait for an extended power failure to find out that the HP-UX box went down hard.