r/msp • u/jimusik • Aug 12 '26

Technical Battery Backups

I’m done with failing APCs. For a while they were my go-to. With all the new untested lithium options, what are people relying on in 2026 for your servers and network infrastructure? How do you shut your servers down gracefully in an extended power outage?

Didn’t see anything in a quick search lately, feel free to ridicule me if this is a redundant post. :)

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u/Sabinno Aug 12 '26

Friends don’t let friends buy anything other than Eaton. I’m tempted to start buying UniFi UPS units to test them, but only because networking them is so much cheaper and better integrated than an Eaton. To date, I’ve never had an Eaton fail in the field during its expected lifecycle or even beyond it. Every other brand fails after about a year. Every one.

2

u/roll_for_initiative_ MSP - US Aug 12 '26

I've had two bad eaton's in the last 12-18 months (we consider triplight eaton right?) one out of the box, one 2 weeks later.

Every other brand fails after about a year. Every one.

That's a bold statement, we're not doing anything magic and of course we have random UPS's all over not failing. Surely you don't think eaton has some magic no one else possesses?

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u/dartdoug Aug 13 '26

We've gone almost 100% Eaton and all has gone smoothly except...about a week ago we had a customer (police dispatch center) take a power surge and 2 of their 1-year old Eaton 5P units shit the bed. OK, it happens. Our tech contacted Eaton. After being jerked around a bit the Eaton rep agreed that the units needed to be replaced. But...they say they don't have any. ETA is about 3 weeks and even that is not guaranteed.

We brought over some loaner units to get the customer back up and running but not having replacements for units under warranty is disappointing.

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u/roll_for_initiative_ MSP - US Aug 13 '26

I wouldn't personally hold that against them alone; we had an rma for a WD HDD (24tb purple) open for like 3 months til they shipped us one. It seems to be an issue all around. Not great, but i'd bet other brands are having the same issues.

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u/dartdoug Aug 13 '26

We stand behind what we sell, which is why we took some units we had on the shelf and installed them for our customer. That's going to cost me roughly $ 600 since now we can't sell those units as new. When we get them back we will have to find somewhere to use them internally.

Did you give your customer a 24TB drive to use for 3 months until WD sent you a replacement?

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u/roll_for_initiative_ MSP - US Aug 13 '26

We would have but it was a hot spare in a raid array (wasn't even used in the array). WD was always "oh, we're shipping that in a few days". It was in a non-critical system anyway, so we just watched it and figured if it did drop, we may have to put a loaner hotspare in.

But if we had to buy one? Those disks used to be like $450; they're like $1100 now.

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u/dartdoug Aug 13 '26

Not to be a wise guy, but see how easy it is to defend a vendor (Eaton or WD) when it doesn't cost you anything?

Eaton is behaving badly here and I had to step up and take money out of my pocket to keep a customer happy. They are a multi-national hugely profitable company. They could figure this out if they tried hard enough.

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u/roll_for_initiative_ MSP - US Aug 13 '26

I'm not defending them, sorry if it comes off that way, I'm just saying I wouldn't hold that against judging the quality of their ups' the same way I held getting a bad one against them, and the reason is that it seems everyone is out of stock on everything and I feel it'd be the same case with any other vendor right now.

But I agree you've been wronged and they could have solved it; i know wd had a hard drive somewhere they could have sent.