Device that allows you to power network gear from dual feeds

R

RiDDLeRThC

2[H]4U
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Jun 13, 2002
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I remember seeing a device a while back that was a y cable that allowed you to take two power feeds and plug it into a switch that would otherwise be limited to a single feed. I cannot remember what it was called but someone on here actually had purchased one.

Can anyone help me out with its name?
 
You couldn't do that with 'just' a Y cable, as that is not only not up to code, but very dangerous. If your gear does not support redundant power supplies, look into redunancy/load balancing abilities of your current gear, plug into separate UPSes on separate circuits.
The best way to add power security to a non-redundant system is an online UPS, where the load is always running ff the battery (no switch-over)
WiebeTech has a device that can provide dual-sourced power safely, but it's meant for temporary use to capture and preserve devices for forensic examination.
If you want redundancy, best way is to get redundant capable gear.
 
I have my doubts as to how much useful redundancy that provides. Redundnat Power supplies will do you alot better. Redundant hot spare equipment or load-balance with fail-over would be the bee's knees.
With the ATS, all you are protecting against is a tripped breaker or power cord yanked from the wall. How often does either scenario happen for you?
 
Well during UPS maintenance in our colo someone killed the wrong breaker dropping power for 5 seconds to all PDU's plugged into UPS A.

It doesn't happen often but mistakes happen.

due to the costs we are just going to buy the RPS modules for our Cisco 2960s and our PowerConnect switches. would be cheaper for us in the long run.

Our switches are redundant anyways but we hadn't moved half of them to the new pdu in our rack. just all our storage and servers were split.
 
Buy the RPS units for your 2960's problem solved :D

We recently switched to the 3750x platform but the 2960 + RPS was rock solid for years.
 
RocketTech said:
I have my doubts as to how much useful redundancy that provides. Redundnat Power supplies will do you alot better. Redundant hot spare equipment or load-balance with fail-over would be the bee's knees.
With the ATS, all you are protecting against is a tripped breaker or power cord yanked from the wall. How often does either scenario happen for you?
Click to expand...

Yep, this. Auto transfer switches are typically steaming piles of horse shit. The problem with them is that most modern power supplies are of the switching variety (for efficiency purposes), and they do not contain many capacitors to store a charge, rendering them almost completely unable to handle transient power spikes or sags. As such, during switchover an auto transfer switch will have a split second of zero output, at which time whatever is connected to it must absorb a pretty significant sag in line voltage, followed by a high spike once the switchover is complete.

Steer clear of these things. They suck. They especially suck if you are using them on two sources of power which are out of phase.
 
We are buying the RPS units from Dell and Cisco to provide secondary power to our two Dell and two Cisco switches.
 
Or you could buy switches from dell and Cisco that already have dual power supplies in them.
 
Dell uses external redundant power supplies for most if not all of their Enterprise class gear. I know the 3xxx and 5xxx series use external RPS. They will also usually power multiple devices, which can actually use less rackspace than equipment with internal RPS, deending on configuration.
 
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