I must have gotten the same ones. They came in packs of three, don't illuminate much, and the light has a kind of sickly yellow-green cast to it -- they remind me of propane lamps I used to have before I got electricity. I bought two packs of the damn things, too, enough for my whole house, and they weren't exactly cheap.
Oh, well -- live and learn, I guess.
So why do I have over 100 PSU's in my computer room? Servers with 3 PSU's for redundancy?
Why can't I have a single server room PSU which provides the 12V, 5V, and -5V on some sort of standardized plug? Make each connection a separate fused bus.
Interesting. This seems like quite a good idea on the face of it. I'm not sure if fusing each bus would be a better idea than a single master fuse. If one bus goes down because the fuse overloads, but the rest are fine, I can imagine some possible unpredictable and/or dangerous scenarios, sort of like what happens in a vacuum-tube device when the bias supply fuse (about the dumbest design decision ever) blows. I don't really know enough about computer electronics to know which way is better, though.
That PSU could be situated ideally for cooling, leaving much of the heat out of my server.
I have a few PSU's doing the AC-DC conversion, not well over 100.
Phase two, my PSU is now my 80KVA APC UPS. It's already doing AC-DC then DC back to AC. Then my PSU's go AC back to DC again. Have my APC UPS go AC-DC and run it at 12V, not 48V. Of course you would also need the 5V and -5V step down's too.
Again, a very interesting idea, and the 5V/-5V step-down is easy, just an extra winding on the transformer secondary. As you stated, most of the cooling in a server is for the power supply -- if we move that out of the racks (or even out of the datacenter; put the big UPS and the cooling it needs in another room, and just have power distribution sockets in the datacenter), then cooling the datacenter becomes a lot simpler, and saves more energy than is saved by eliminating a couple of conversion steps.
In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
