UPS – Battery Backup and Surge Protection

As we close in on the end of the year, it is a good opportunity to review your entire IT operation. For this discussion, we are going to focus on UPS and battery backup.

There have been advances in battery technology. The sealed Lead Acid battery is still used for most UPS systems. There have been advances made in battery management and testing. Plus in areas that there are power surges/brown-outs/black-outs and storms, the UPS components can start showing wear after years in production.…it is not just the batteries.

Many have made changes in their data centers and compute environments over the year and it is an excellent opportunity to look at battery protection and power protection. Virtualization can shrink the number of racks or amount of physical equipment.

We have discussions about N+1 (systems designed to withstand the loss of a component) and building in fault-tolerance and high availability into client systems on a regular basis. Make sure that your battery backup and surge protection can add loss of power to overcome as a “component failure point”.

With more applications moving to the hosted/cloud providers (i.e. ERP, file sync and share, email, CRM, etc) it is increasingly important to have redundancies for network layer circuits and equipment. As multiple changes occur, it is a prudent idea to review power and battery backup. Some of the questions you can ask are:

• Do we have any new network equipment that needs power protection and/or battery backup?
• Do our remote offices have adequate battery backup and surge protection?
• Have we added equipment? If so, have we calculated the impact on battery backup?
• Is our current battery run-time appropriate for the business? (business needs change)
• Is energy efficiency something that is important to us?
• How old our UPS systems? If it is more than 5 years old, you should be looking at replacement.
• Will it benefit us to conserve rack U space?

Battery backup and power conditioning are vitally important to your systems. Remote offices, remote workers, and network equipment all need some analysis…and if it has not formally been done, now is an excellent time to review.

This can be a help in budgeting for 2018 and looking back at changes to the business in 2017. Let us know if we can help out too!