Power Management

About a year and a half ago I installed an APC Smart-UPS 3000 RM XL to replace a much smaller and very old UPS. This thing is a beast, and it's done a great job of protecting the currently 5 servers, tape autoloader and some networking hardware (all that at only 39% load). CLC is notorious for bad power, and we've recently had as many as 4 outages in 3 weeks. I feel very lucky that nothing major has happened to any of our equipment.

My biggest concern lately is that if our power is out for longer than 15-20 minutes, the APC UPS dies and all that connected equipment shuts down hard (ouch!). I've been looking for a solution that, in the event of an extended outage, would:

• page my cell phone to alert me of the problem
• gracefully shut down all the servers before the battery dies, and
• reboot all servers when the power is restored

It's kind of funny because I talked to several high-end IT consulting types and they didn't have a clue how to do all that. After some research, I settled on PowerChute Business Edition (PCBE). As it turns out, a copy came with the UPS and it's been sitting in a filing cabinet for a year and a half - doh!

I've really wanted to solve this for a while now, but trying to find the time . . .
Well, four outages in three weeks is enough to drive something up the priority scale. Today I dove in head first and here's what I learned:

PowerChute Business Edition comes in 2 flavors: Basic and Deluxe.
I have Basic and that's fine. You can see the major differences here.

There's 3 elements to PCBE: the PowerChute Agent, the Server, and the Console.

• The Agent provides UPS status monitoring and, in the event of an extended power outage, system
  shutdown capabilities for UPS-protected computers. This software must be installed on each computer that is directly attached (via a serial cable) to one of the UPS systems.
• The Server is used to configure and monitor the PCBE Agents. The PowerChute Server gathers information from the Agents and provides centralized event tracking, event notification and a single point of contact for the PowerChute Console. This software must be installed on a networked computer, and preferably one with an Agent installed as well.
• The Console connects to the PowerChute Business Edition Server to provide the user interface for
  managing and configuring UPS-protected systems. Install the Console on any workstation, desktop, or laptop (running a supported operating system). I've got it installed on my laptop.

The installation was really straight forward. The only issues were because of my ignorance. I assumed I needed one server directly connected to the UPS via a serial cable and it would be responsible for alerting the other servers to shut down in an outage. Wrong!

Shutting down multiple servers from a single Smart-UPS requires some additional hardware.
Oh well - I'm headed in the right direction. For a couple hundred more bucks I can complete the setup and gracefully shut down all the servers when we lose power. For now I can control one server, as well as monitor the health of the UPS.

Most importantly, though, I now have a notification system in place when we lose power. After some research and testing, I was able to configure PCBE to email my cell phone when there's a problem. That's miles ahead of the "I hope our Maintenance guy remembers to call me" solution I was using before.

I think I'm on the right track. What's everybody else doing?