UPS Uninterruptable Power - anybody know how to spec one up (on the cheap!)?

[JohnnyE]

My brother in law has a small business, manufacturing composite doors. His office setup is terrible.. so I'm trying to help him out and have bought 2 x workstation PC's and am setting up a basic network for them. They have no backup strategy in place at all right now!

One big issue for them is that the power dips a few times a day. They are in a rural location and use generators to power some of the equipment. It causes their office PCs to lose power. They've also got a small phone switchboard powering the office phones.

So... onto UPS power supplies.

I need to keep up:

2 x HP Z600 Workstations
2 x 23" monitors
1 x ADSL router
1 x small hub
1 x phone switchboard (no idea what that is yet)

They don't need power for very long - just enough to trigger a graceful/soft shutdown via USB i assume (not having every used or configured one!!)

I've been looking at the PC World business site https://www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk/ca...management/ups and correct me if I'm wrong here... do I need to add up the power drain in Watts of each device and then get a UPS with a higher Watt rating? (if that's the case... I'm in trouble... as each workstation has a 650w power supply although I suppose that at max drain?)

I'm confused!... but this isn't going to be solved cheaply is it? if one big UPS is expensive - I guess I could buy multiple, cheaper models?

[Arcam]

If you are going for a UPS then stick with APC, best device out there.

An APC 1500 smart ups would do the job you need.

Not priced one in a while but mine for my home servers/office was around £350 I think.

You could drop to a 1000 smart ups if funds are tight, if the 350 price seems OK I will dig up the correct part numbers for you.

The 1500 and 1000 are the VA rating BTW.

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[JohnnyE]

Its this VA rataing that has be confused...

Looks like a nice bit of kit that: https://www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk/ca...ory&heat=title

Im sure he can buy it and claim the VAT back, so £250 is about right for the job.

[Arcam]

Its this VA rataing that has be confused...

Looks like a nice bit of kit that: https://www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk/ca...ory&heat=title

Im sure he can buy it and claim the VAT back, so £250 is about right for the job.

I was thinking of the Smart version but that one you picked will do the job nicely.

APC UPS devices are the nuts!

I have used them professionly for over 20 year and installed more that I can remember and had 2 fail at +5 years dusty service.

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[Captain Morgan]

I’ve been beaten to it APC are the go to guys, I use this on my nas

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/400v...ge-protection)

It also connects to the nas via usb and if the power is lost you can set a battery level at which the nas will power down so you get a graceful shut down if the power outage is more than a blip.

Last time I checked scan were around the cheapest but this may have changed.

[amnesia]

Personally I'd sort the back-up process first.
It's not backed-up unless it exists in at least THREE places, and one of those should be off-site.

Losing data of the thing you're currently doing is annoying... losing ALL of your data is game over.

[hogthrob]

Its this VA rataing that has be confused...

If you spec the VA to be 1.7 times the Watt figure, you should be OK.

[Arcam]

Satellite BB would be my last choice, high latency and slow DL speeds unless they have improved things dramatically in the last few years.

Is there a decent 4G signal, if so you can do a 4G dongal on each machine or if you get the right router share the connection.

My choice of router for the proposed setup would be Draytek (Vigor), check out www.seg.co.uk and look at the options and pick the one that suits best, you could also do away with your hub as it would be redundant unless you need more that 4/5 network ports.


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[JohnnyE]

Here's the thing about that broadband.... Their router literally goes offline randomly, loses adsl. I'm a BT residential customer myself and mine rarely if ever goes offline.

I wonder is good just a crap/old router rather than bad adsl? I must ask them if they have got BT out to investigate. I'd have thought that at worst they should have constant, slow connection speeds given that they are rural.... But a line that is up/down all the time?

Doesn't add up does it. Is there any kind of monitoring I can do from this side I wonder?

[petethegeek]

Building on Arcam's previous reply; if you do start considering cellular as an alternative then you might like to take a quick look at the latter part of this thread - http://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.ph...-advice-please, post #17 in particular. (If you haven't already seen it that is.)

[Captain Morgan]

There are options other than Sat.

I believe that if the line is a dedicated business line then you should have a level of service above domestic so yes its worth having the line checked.

Whats the traffic profile like, email only, voip, large file transfers, etc...

What is the line are you sure its adsl, could it be isdn or a leased line? If not is it posable to move to one of them or have a new line installed, it might be easier to have issues resolved on a new line but this could be a more costly approach.

Who's the provider? it might be worth moving to a more customer focused provider - zen get consistently good reports but may not be available in your area. (disclosure we use zen in two locations for soho use)

Obviously dependent on your traffic levels you might find 4G costly.

If they are using adsl then yep it might be worth trying a new cheap router to test if that is the issue. If your unsure then I would not invest heavily on a new router until you understand the final solution, view it as a cheap consumable unit to keep as a temporary replacement if the final solution has a failure.

[JohnnyE]

Thanks petethegeek / Captain Morgan - I've a list of questions now and will call out to the office to see what they've got and what's been done so far.

Load/bandwidth wise, its just daily email with attachments really. Nothing intensive at all - so this SHOULD be easily resolved.

[Mr Pointy]

Here's the thing about that broadband.... Their router literally goes offline randomly, loses adsl. I'm a BT residential customer myself and mine rarely if ever goes offline.

I wonder is good just a crap/old router rather than bad adsl? I must ask them if they have got BT out to investigate. I'd have thought that at worst they should have constant, slow connection speeds given that they are rural.... But a line that is up/down all the time?

Doesn't add up does it. Is there any kind of monitoring I can do from this side I wonder?

There's a tool on the ADSLGuide website you can set up to monitor latency & packet loss on your line:

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broad...toring/quality

All it needs is your router to be configured to respond to ping requests.