Pros and Cons of Having a UPS for Your Server in a Data Center

datacenterups

According to this comment by Tom O'Connor (slightly edited below):

You can seriously cheese off a datacentre by putting an UPS inside your own rack.

What are the risks to the data center should a customer (somehow) choose to do this?

Best Answer

Pros:

  1. None

Cons:

  1. It interrupts the flow of the Emergency Power Off (EPO) in the datacenter. If there is a life or death emergency in a datacenter, that EPO might be triggered to save someone's life. If your rack has its own UPS, it will violate that EPO order.

  2. You will not get extended runtime. Chances are as soon as your upstream UPS switches into battery mode, your UPS will detect the change in sine wave and drop into backup mode as well.

  3. You'll violate your warranty and potentially your datacenter's UPS warranty. UPSs are warrantied to be installed in very specific scenarios and power sources. Your UPS-on-UPS is not going to be a supported configuration.

  4. (from rexkogitans) You have to care about your UPS while there is a staff caring for a UPS that may be provided to you nonetheless. So it adds administrating a UPS to your work really unnecessarily.

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