SUMMARY : E4500 Power

Hi everyone,

I was looking for some general real-life scenarios and that is exactly
what I got. I was quite aware of what the sun website said ;-) 

My sincere thanks go to :-

Geoff Lane
Steve elliott
Roy Rapoport
Mark Lewis
Joseph Herpers
Al Hopper
and anyone else who will still come in with their valuable input.

I have noted everything in these guys' responses, placed below for your
information.

The spec I have suggests 240V @ 12amps should be OK for a basic 4500 box
but approved resellers have access to s/w that can calculate the needs for
your exact setup. Disk arrays etc can all add up to a significant amount. 
You also have to allow for a switch-on surge much greater than 12amps for
a few millisecs. 
                                                                                
An ordinary 13amp ring main will probably not cope.     

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The E4500 has exactly one power supply and any number of Power
Distribution Units (PDUs).  You cannot get another poewr supply.  In fact,
the E4500 is obscene in that it's a ~$250K machine with non-redundant
power. 
                                                                                
The way the PDUs work is that there is a PDU slot for every two boards
(1&3 and 5&7 in the back; 0&2 and 4&6 on the front).  If you have a board
in a slot, you need to have a PDU in there.  So if you have boards in
slots 1, 5, 0, and 6, for example, you'd need four PDUs, but if you put
these boards in 1,3, 0 and 2, you'd need two PDUs. 
                                                                                
Make sense? This is for the US version, BTW.  I'm pretty certain it works
the same way, but of course, I'm only warrantying my answer for the amount
of money you paid for it ;)
----
ensure you order 2 power supplies per chassis.  they need to be ordered
separately, unless you know they are in the base pacakge your vendor
supplies you with.  they will be fine.  it would be better to have
redundant power supplies though, in case 1 dies... 

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First, The power supply family for the EnterpriseT 4000/4500 is made up of
Fan Tray power supply/AC, the peripheral power supply known as (PPS) and
power cooling module.  You will probably be getting a newer generation
4500/4501, that can be populated with 4 power supplies for the various
power needs, ref.  to above. Our documentation which combines Sun's
information with a wide range on info from our strategic partners, most of
which are the largest of the 3rd party and Sun integrators, think that the
4 power supplies are very sufficient. This offers full power redundancy,
unless you are fully populating the system with 14 CPU's of the 400Mhz
type, this puts more draw on the power because of the 100MHz backplane
speed, all other processors are at 84Mhz, so full population is not a
concern at that more draw on the power because of the 100MHz backplane
speed, all other processors are at 84Mhz, so full population is not a
concern at that speed. If its a 4501 you may also have to pay attention to
the clock board because of the CPU to Gigaplane speed ratio: 4:1 & 5:1.  I
know this isn't definitive, but I already felt I was long winded, Hope
this helps somewhat. 
                                                                                
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Plenty of food for thought. Many thanks again.

Mark Mahabir.