Power-event protection for Suns

[Paul Allen]

Does anyone have any experience with hardening Suns against power events
other than ponying up the cash for a full-blown UPS?  It's my
understanding that HP mini's all have integral power-fail detection and
enough battery backup to shut down gracefully.  It would be really nice to
be able to put a board full of batteries (or whatever) inside each of my
servers and not worry about my disks being corrupted by power outages.

The reason for my sudden concern is that we had a "power event" over the
weekend that damaged one of my disk partitions so badly that fsck wouldn't
touch it.  Since Suns don't seem to have any facility for orderly shutdown
on powerfail, I've been thinking of putting together a setup that would
include the following:

	- A power-conditioning system capable of attenuating
	  spikes to the point that they don't pose a problem.

	- A small UPS capable of sustaining the machines for
	  a minute or so.

	- A device capable of detecting a powerfail and causing
	  the servers to shut down.

The first two items are fairly straight-forward.  I can think of ways to
kluge up the third item, but am wondering if anyone knows of a product to
do this.

Paul Allen

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Paul L. Allen                       | pallen at atc.boeing.com
Boeing Advanced Technology Center   | ...!uw-beaver!bcsaic!pallen