Running Systems

We’ve had some issues with electricity going down on specific rack closets. We have a single 16A fuse for each closet. On some, the ones containing older Sun servers, about 12 servers were able to go into a rack closet, so we’ve had no issues with power consumptions. However, on a rack closet holding many 1U and 2U servers (PC servers, mainly. For example – HP DL360G4 (1U), HP DL380G4 (2U), Dell PE2850 (2U) etc), we’ve reached, on a 3/4 full closet, to about 17 servers. Oh, and we’ve got our power fuse jump. It appears that on an average calculation, as a rule of thumb, each PC server consumes about 1.2A in average. Meaning that on a 16A fuse, we can put about 12 PC servers, with some safe margins. We do wish to avoid exceeding 14A consumption, for better stability, for the ability to start the whole closet up at a single pass, and so we won’t have to test the fuse 24/7. 

A note – If you’re mixing power sources inside your rack closet, better mark the power sources, so you’ll know which goes where. It’s for better stability.