APC Smart-UPS: remote power shutoff

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Given:

  1. A server room containing about two dozen rackmount servers and a PBX.
  2. About a dozen APC Smart-UPS 2200s providing power to this equipment.
  3. A fire suppression project requiring immediate shutoff of power to all servers in the event that the fire suppression agent is released to extinguish an electrical fire.
  4. We assume that, using separate hardware, we will be able to generate an SNMP trap from the fire suppression system's alarm relay output, and that this will trigger some kind of a UPS power shutdown script on our Nagios server (which fortunately does not share a rack or a UPS with any other servers).

Question:

  1. Is it possible to shut down the power to all devices plugged into an APC UPS via SNMP, assuming that we equip each UPS with an ethernet card? The documentation that I've seen refers extensively to the ability to shut down servers gracefully in the event of a power failure via PowerChute; in this case, we would not have time to shut them down gracefully.
  2. Does it matter which model of ethernet adapter we use in order to accomplish this? It appears that the old 10Mbps models (AP9606) are available refurbished for quite a lot less money than it would cost to purchase the current model cards; I am unclear as to whether there are significant differences in feature set, other than ethernet bandwidth.
  3. Would it be better, for some reason, to use serial cables instead of ethernet cards?

The intent of this question is to tap into your real-world experience with APC UPSs. To date, we have not used any remote management features, and the documentation that I have found to date does not seem to be clear as to whether power can be shut off unceremoniously via SNMP.

Best Answer

Depending on the precise model of UPS, your best bet is to wire the EPO port on the back of those UPSes to the EPO switch on the fire panel.

Smart-UPS 2200 manual, see page 6.

Since these UPSes actually have an actual Emergency Power Off function built in, in order to make your fire-inspectors happy you need to wire those ports to the EPO function of the fire-panel itself. I'm not an electrician, so I don't know the specifics of how you'd wire 10's of these to a single EPO port on the fire panel, but that's a question for your fire panel system vendor.

Half-assing it with suicide software monitors on servers connected to each UPS is the kind of close-enough that gets fire-inspectors to shake their head in that special way that means you'll have to do it all over again, but right this time.

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