Thursday, June 5, 2008

UPS's don't like small generators

In our effort to keep our datacenter running we rented a relatively small generator to run our IT services during our multi-day power outage. We found out the hard way that small generators and our battery backups don't work well together. The electricians were explaining to us how the power is sometimes too dirty for a UPS to function. The units would switch contently between line power and the battery. Unfortunately  the batteries weren't off long enough to charge and they were eventually drained. Now we are on a quest to find out how to run our datacenter on emergency power. We don't actually pull that much juice but we don't want to run on dirty power. If you have some experience with small generators and computer equipment, I'd love to get your take (read: solution) on this problem.

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