Tripp Lite PDUMH15AT vs. APC Switched Rack PDU

Remote switched PDU (Power Distribution Unit) outlets are a awesome thing to have in your data center environment especially if you have your equipment located off site. I first started using them around 2002 or 2003 and quickly made a case that almost all devices except the primary switches and routers should be on them. We were on a single homed internet connection so if the primary switch or router was down you couldn't get to the PDU anyway. In reality you should have redundant routers, switches and secondary uplink so that even those devices could be placed on remote reboot-able outlets.

Anyway since the beginning I have always used APC and never even thought about trying another vendor because well the APC's work, they work well and why fix something that's not broke. A few months back though I was in a bind and needed to get some remote reboot outlets fast. I couldn't find a local vendor that had APC in stock. One of the vendors (Altex) had some Tripp Lite units that are supposed compete with APC and they were quite a bit cheaper. I probably should have looked a bit more because when I origionally called the vendor they had no idea what a Remote Switched PDU outlet was. In fact the first model number they showed me was for a metered PDU (Metered PDU's generally have a LED display indicating the number of AMP's currently being pulled) which had no remote capabilities at all. In any case I figured Tripp Lite makes some decent stuff a lot of it kinda seems cheap compared to some other vendors but it should do the trick.

A few months have passed and I have had to use the remote reboot units a few times and while I have to say the Tripp Lite's do work as advertised, coming from using APC I have been vary disappointed. First off the web interface is sluggish, not very friendly. In additon to that last APC web interface looks better and was more functional that the current Tripp Lite interface. Next the Tripp lite box is 3+ times the depth of the APC which leads me to believe that its running some kind of semi embedded interface with a processor and CF (Compact Flash) card compared to the APC unit which uses a small little card (ive had to replace one before its amazing they fit all that functionality on that little embedded device.) For some reason that APC card is much faster though. Last on to the actual turning on and off of outlets, with the APC I have been on the phone with my friend Dave and had him reboot a box for me it the APC is able to cycle multiple outlets simultaneously while leaving others on and have it all happen in a second or less. The Tripp Lite's on the other hand are less friendly, you can either reboot all outlets on a PDU (in my option a worthless option) or you can do one at a time, which is a pain in the butt when you have servers with more than one power supply and don't have them on a Y power cord. To make matters worse the lag time from asking the Tripp Lite to turn off/on/cycle an outlet is more than a minute and so far it seems to only be able to take one action at a time; meaning you turn off outlet 1 wait for it to show off (minute and a half) then you can cycle outlet 2 to reboot the box (another minute and a half), wait for the box to show its running again and then turn outlet 1 back on. All in all when your dealing with stuff in Data center's those few extra minutes can be the difference between getting your but chewed out and being the savior.

In conclusion it would have been worth the extra money and waiting an extra day or two to get an APC shipped.

P.S. I forgot configuring the Tripp Lite's was a pain in the ass too some weird thing where if the network cable is not plugged in at boot the web interface doesn't start or some bull shit. It sucked.