Re: How long does a PWRDWNSYS restart(*no) actually take?

I have seen waay over an hour and under 2 minutes. The answer truly is "It Depends."

The only way to know for your particular system is to pick a time when a bunch of activity has just concluded and power it down, watching the SRC codes as it goes, noting time and and duration.

There is so much that depends, do you have internal or external disk. How many? How much cache? SSDs, 15K, 10K and how big are they? What has just run that dirtied up all the cache of your drives and RAID cards? (a great example is a SAVE 21 with UPDHST at *Yes!)

If nothing has been running for the last two hours and nobody is on it may shut down happily in well under 5 minutes or it may take more time than your batteries have when fully charged! It truly is a YMMV situation that only you can test!

As to batteries yeah some UPS brands and lines of UPS within brands are better then others at internal testing and warnings. Others won't say a peep until the power goes out then all you get is 'peep' and down she goes. As a 'general rule' the larger the UPS the better it will be at monitoring and internal testing that actually means something. No matter which brand though, best practice is to replace the batteries BEFORE they fail as IBM has done with RAID Cache Batteries for decades. Usually 3 years on the low side and almost never more than 5 years on the high side.

I can say that if you want your batteries fully cooked and dried buy an APC UPS. They have the best battery cookers on the planet. Often cooked so well they've swollen up to the point you can't even get 'em out!

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 7/31/2017 2:11 PM, Kirk Goins wrote:

If you give it say 2 extra minutes that should be fine. The program will
most likely wait for low battery or a specific time. My 25 cents is if the
power is out, public or gen. for more than say 5min it is going to be out
for a long time. So wait for 5min ( maybe ) and then just starting shutting
things down.

Small UPS's and even some larger ones don't do a good job of sensing
battery issues. Most vendors say batteries are good maybe 2-5yrs. You also
said you had Cache Batteries were done about 3yrs ago... Well those are
getting close to being done again. My thoughts are this.
#1 See when the batteries are due.
#2 When it is time to change them, the tech will fail them.
#3 Bring the system to a Restricted State.
#4 Once in a restricted state remove input power to the UPS. This will sim
a power failure and give a pretty good test of the UPS/Batteries. Wait for
5min plus the time your system takes to shutdown. If they don't hold get
new batteries. If were me, I would get new batteries and swap them out
while things are down...




On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 7:17 AM, Jim Hawkins <jhawkins@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have been tasked to write a program to monitor the UPS on our IBM power
system. I found a good base program-so that is all good. We have a
generator
that is supposed to kick in within the 1st minute of a power failure. My
question is more of "what if the generator fails?" From my research, it
appears that the ups on the system will last for about 20 minutes.

We do an IPL each week (pwrdwnsys *immed restart(*yes)), (it is what it is,
I'm not rocking the boat on this one, so save your breath). What I see in
the log is entries indicating: this ended, that ended, etc. for about a
minute and a half, then nothing for 32 minutes when I see "Unattended IPL
in
progress".

If the generator fails, I want to power down the system, but I am not sure
how much time I have to wait. The last time we did a pwrdwnsys
restart(*no)
was 3 years ago when we had to replace the cache battery-and I don't recall
that far back (lol).

I want the system to power down on my terms, not the terms of the UPS. So,
good folks, how much time do I really have to power down, before my UPS
runs
out of batteries? (Yes, I will allocate a little extra for the unexpected
and the fact the batteries are 7+ years old.) Just simply, at what point is
the system powered off?

(I will be away from my email from noon today until next week)





TIA



Jim Hawkins

Programmer Analyst

Interkal LLC

Kalamazoo, MI



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