Redundant Power Supplies

[Ayman Altounji]

Here is my question. We have a full redundant datacenter with power comming from two different locations. The problem is that the ML570 has 3 power supplies and if you loose 2 the server dies. Is their a way to make it run on one power supply or is their some way to make one of the power supplies failover to the other power distrubution unit if we loose one power distrubution unit? We have tested the ML570's and if you pull two power coards the server dies and will not run on 1 power supply.

[Ayman Altounji]

When the 3 power supplies are installed in the Server they are setup in a Fault Tolerance configuration , 1 of the 3 power supplies , is configured as a backup to the other two . If one power supply fails the backup will kick in , but if two fail the server will not stay up .

[Ayman Altounji]

We have the same problem in our datacenter. The number of power cables for the ML570, 1600, and ML370 is a real problem. We're all wondering why Compaq chose to do this rather than use two reduncant power supplies like they did with the old 5500s. Perhaps someone from Compaq could explain? None of use can think of a technical reason, only an economic one: replacing a smaller power supplier is cheaper than a larger one. In fact, in our secondary data center we have a bigger problem - only one of our power distribution units is on UPS, so if we lose the wrong one, we lose the server anyway.