Web Power Switch III
Digital Loggers, Inc. sells the Web Power Switch III.
Throw the manual in the trash...who needs that!
Comes with a monster cord
This is where you stick your fork
So this little guy has 10 outlets and 8 of which are controllable. You can log into it’s web interface and selectively power on or off ports. You can setup multiple user accounts that have access to only specific ports. It has an auto ping setup that allows you to ping devices and then selectively reboot ports. This gives you the ability to have the power switch monitor your radios/routers and reboot them automatically as needed.
Video preview of the device configuration:
So you get all of this functionality for ~$120…sounds well worth the peace of mind to me. How many of you guys use these? How many of you guys are going to start using these? 😉
I have one. It does what I expect. The GUI looks like garbage and is kind of confusing. I suggest plugging in something and experimenting with the config before deploying it.
There are a handful of people who have had no problems at all and others that have had nothing but problems. I don’t think we have narrowed down the cause, but it may just be gremlins.
The problem with digital loggers is they have some issues with the web-server. These aren’t as bad as some of the others. The biggest complaint I have after deploying 100+ of these is the web-server will either default or just plain lock you out. Takes a reset to bring it back. You can ping it so monitoring software does not see it as down. But you can’t login to it. The DC models are the worst at this.
We’ve used APC’s “managed PDU’s” a few times now, quite handy to have for sites where a UPS just isn’t justifiable!
On other notable power related setups, I’m not even remotely in the Data Centre business myself, but recently had a disaster waiting to happen pointed out to me in a site where someone was using 2 of these sort of devices.
The scenario is this: You have dual power feeds into a rack and 2 PDU’s (or these devices) which we’ll assume can each handle a maximum of 15 Amps per circuit.
People will happily load these up above 7.5 Amps without even thinking about it, which becomes a big problem if/when the power on the first circuit goes out, as what does the current do?
All power goes over to the second circuit creating a load of 20+Amps (if both devices were loaded to 10 Amps) and tripping the power on that side too.
Bye bye to both circuits and all the servers in that rack that are now down :-O
This may be all elementary to some of you but it’s something I honestly hadn’t considered until it was staring me in the face so I figured I’d pass it on 🙂
@Andrew
Indeed. It is something I have to explain on nearly a weekly basis. Here at the datacenter, we require customers to have A/B power circuits for this very reason…it’s actually in our contracts that you will take follow this methodology. You are only allowed to use 80% of a single whip in whatever combination you choose. Perhaps I’ll write a quick post on it…heh.
Have used a lot of these (hundreds) Web Power Switches without any problems at all. The web server -will- lock you out after a number of failed username/password attempts, but you can configure that on the setup page. Much better value than APC or Tripplite in my opinion. Check out the “scripting language”. I wish they made a larger (40-50Amp) input model. DLI doesn’t advertise an A/B failover switch, but they do make them also.
@Bill
I’ve used a handfull of them with great success. Just curious…what are you switching that is pulling 40-50A?