PDU for high amp 48Vdc

Robert Drake rdrake at direcpath.com
Thu Jan 29 02:38:16 UTC 2015


For larger DC devices with ~50amps per side, does anyone have a software 
accessible way to turn off power?

I've looked into PDU's but the ones I find have a max of 10amps.

I've considered building something with solenoids or a rotary actuator 
that would turn the switches on or off, but that's a complete one-off 
and would need to be done for each device we manage (not to mention it 
involves janky wiring all over the place I've got to explain to the colo)

My use case is pretty infrequent so it needs to be remote-hands cheap.. 
it's for emergencies when you need to completely power cycle a 
redundantly powered DC device.  The last time I needed this it was 
because a router was stuck in a boot loop due to a bad IOS upgrade and 
wouldn't break to rommon since it had been >60 seconds.  It came up 
again tonight because we wanted to disable one power supply to 
troubleshoot something.

FWIW, I believe I've seen newer Cisco gear with high-end power supplies 
that have a console or ethernet port which would possibly let you shut 
them down remotely.  That solves the problem nicely if you're dealing 
with only one bit of hardware, but I'd like a general solution that 
worked with any vendor.  Possibly a fuse panel with solenoids that could 
add/remove fuses when needed.. or would that be considered dangerous in 
code-ways or in telco fire regulation ways?







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