No Hassle RAID 5 Implementations?

LambSpam asks: "I had a nightmare week (last week) with two of our servers running Intel's U3-1L RAID controller (RAID 5). Whenever there's a power outage in our building these controllers randomly mark one or more of the drives in the array offline (even with adequate UPS support), which means I have to manually mark them online and/or rebuild. Intel acknowledged the problem, but their solution involves updating the backplane's firmware, the controller firmware (destructive upgrade!), and even the firmware on our IBM drives in the array because they 'draw too much power' in certain conditions. I've only used one other RAID 5 implementation (MegaRAID), and it NEVER had these kinds of problems, whereas if you sneeze too hard around this U3-1L card it will go offline. Is this common with most hardware RAID implementations? What RAID 5 implementations works without hassle? What should I stay away from?"

Re:Good advice above.

[walt-sjc]

Ahhh! NO!!! Do NOT NOT NOT put everything on one circuit. First, computers with switching power supplies (almost 100% are) are NON-linear in power usage. They draw LARGE spikes of current sporadically. Second, if you blow a circuit, EVERYTHING YOU HAVE goes down. BAD BAD BAD! Third, if you run dual power supplies on your equipment, a power problem / spike on the circuit will affect both power supplies, not even counting that 50% of the benefit of dual power supplies is so that you have power redundancy.

As others have statued, make sure you have a true "online" ups, but ALSO make sure that you don't run over 50% power utilization on the UPS either due to the non-linear nature of switching power supplies.

Of course the BEST power stability solution is to use all 48VDC equipment like Telco's do. When was the last time your phone went down due to telco hardware failure? Note that most Major hardware vendors have 48VDC versions of their equipment (Sun, Cisco, etc.)