XS1300 APC Failure during Power Surge

[BillP]

Hello Community,

I need some assistance troubleshooting a issue we just recently had.  We have a IBM class server running our Exchange 2010 and yesterday we experienced a storm that took power out in all of the town we are in.  Now what happened is we expected out exchange to stay up so we could softly shut it down until power was restored.  It has redundant power running seperately to two different XS1300 APC Power Backup systems.  Each one of these plug into a outlet that is on a different breaker.  When we lost power the exchange server experienced a hard shutdown and the XS1300's didn't allow us any time, so we figured maybe we had two bad XS1300's.

So when power finally came back on we used the time to do a test.  We unplugged one of the cords to one of the PSU's in the server and the power on the server failed to the secondary PSU and stayed on.  So we confident the hardware in the server itself is sound.  Next we disconnected one of the redundant PSU's on the server, and unplugged the XS1300 its connected two, and the server stayed on, then we switched to the other PSU and the other XS1300 and it stayed on, so needless to say we are confused why our exchange server went down hard when our tests allowed us to test individual points of failure and check off they were all working as intended.  We don't have any management software for the XS1300's running to check any sort of logfile, and if Powerchute is something we could utilize just let me know.

Can anyone see what I might be missing?

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Do you know how much battery runtime you should've gotten when the power outage came along? Is it possible it is only a few minutes and the UPSs ran out of battery power assuming both circuits lost power at the same time?

Were the UPSs off when you walked over too? When you turned them back on, did you notice the charge level? When AC power came back, they would've began charging again though even when they were turned off.

My other thought is that Back UPS products are not really intended for server type hardware where we'd recommend a Smart UPS. I don't know if any of the issues with the Back UPS and server class hardware showed during this event (PFC power supply, transfer time, issue with step approximated sine wave) but if you did the simulation later, I'd have to say probably not.

PowerChute Personal Edition is the software you'd need with this along with a USB cable that ships with the UPSs. This won't help us now since it was not running but it'd be good for future monitoring (although it is basic and intended for a home user) and it'd also provide graceful shutdown. If it is a server OS though, there are limitations on the timing for shutdown if your server OS takes a while to turn off and stop its services.