The invention relates to powering system units. In particular, the invention relates to facilitating the manufacture and maintenance of system units that require a reliable power supply for use in environments and applications that place high demands on system reliability, for example in the telecommunications industry.
Deregulation and privatization is causing unprecedented competition in the worldwide telecommunications market. This climate of fierce competition has meant that service providers must introduce new, more sophisticated and user-friendly services at an accelerated pace to retain or attract subscribers, while not compromising traditional telecommunications company (telco) service quality.
These pressures of competition have also placed high demands on Network Equipment Providers (NEPs). Traditionally, NEPs have designed, built and supported proprietary computing equipment, as the strict telco requirements could not be met by the commercial computing sector. Those requirements include the so-called Telcordia Technologies Network Equipment Buildings Systems (NEBS) tests. However, due to the lead times required to design and test such proprietary equipment, and the cost of supporting such equipment, there is a need to find another route, at least for the supply of the more cost and performance sensitive sectors within the telco industry.
A major concern of the telco sector is the reliability of systems. To address this issue, many prior systems, for example for providing the function of a telco server computer, have employed redundant computer systems. In such a redundant computer system, two or more processing sets are provided, typically with each being configured on a separate motherboard and with a mechanism for voting between the processing sets to determine whether one is faulty. Each of the processing sets may include one or more processors. If the voting system determines that one of the processing sets is faulty, then the other one or more processing sets can continue to function. In such systems, other multiple versions of other of the components of the system can be provided. For example, it is known to provide three power supply units such that if one of the power supply units fails, the system can continue to function with power from the remaining two power supply units.
In order to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the telco industry, and in order to provide equipment at reasonable cost and within reasonable time scales, it would be desirable facilitate manufacture and testing of the system units and components. Also, in order to reduce as far as possible any down time, it is desirable that maintenance is facilitated.
Accordingly, it is an aim of the present invention to address the provision of cost-effective equipment that can meet technical demands of the telco environments, while also meeting the modern commercial demands of that environment.