jhg, I heard Dreihaus on WSW and hustled to this thread like another poster I just read. Dreihaus talked about two aspects of Power-One's products, first clean electricity, and then reliability, on which he spent some time using the "nines" lingo that the computer people use. Back to clean electricity, I assumed he meant Power-One has products that "clean up" the raw AC feeds that ultimately have Hoover Dam or nuclear plant origin, if you go back far enough. Often that power can get ugly in its waveform or power factor, or surge or sag with demand, be subject to brownouts and things like that. So, I expected to see UPS's (uninterruptible power supplies) and related products at Power-One's website. They weren't immediately evident, but I didn't spend a lot of time there.
The reliability and the nines thing: "5 nines" is considered to be an excellent reliability rating is computer systems, meaning the equipment it's referring to is up, or functional 99.999% of the time. Going through the math, that means you're down about 37 minutes a year. Dreihaus said this (actually he started at 3 nines) is good enough for hospitals or defense (I think???) related industries, but not nearly good enough for network infrastructure companies like Cisco. He escalated up to something like 9 nines, which gives a fraction of a second of outage time a year, and concluded with himself that that's what is needed. Again, I see no products with that extreme of reliability upon glancing at Power-One's site. Either they don't blow the reliability horn enough, or Dreihaus is talking about future products, or I don't have enough patience.
Anyway, PWER has had one hell of a run. Parabolic, I'd call it.
Tony |
