How often are you affected by power outages and how high is the risk?
Some facts first
In Germany about 200 000 power outages are registered per year, leaving in the dark whole streets, villages, districts or even whole regions. Even worse, in these statistics only “relevant” blackouts are filed, which are only those above 30 seconds. By international comparison this is a very low number. Each of these outages entails a risk for huge data loss if you are not using an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). According to our research and analysis of numbers provided by the Federal Network Agency and numerous other publications of other operators, we found out that about every 4 ½ years every business is hit by a power outage that lasts longer than half an hour. The probability of being hit by a shorter blackout is of course much higher.
How long will your UPS keep up?
An UPS is undoubtedly something essential for serious working. If outages last longer, UPS systems soon reach their hold-up time. A more powerful UPS is no solution at the end, even power generators will eventually run out of fuel. How long your UPS really can hold up is different for every environment and is depending on the charging state, the capacity (which is dependent on the age of the battery) and finally it is depending on how many devices are secured. The only dependable way to find out how long your UPS will keep up is by making a runtime calibration.
Where is the problem?
For almost all UPS systems the manufacturers provide a software which should allow the handling and maintenance of your UPS. This works quite well for smaller systems. It becomes difficult if you are using multiple computers or even virtualization. Often the manufacturer software is not able to handle this. Just try it!
Ignoring this problem can become expensive very quickly. Probably the worst case scenario is a failed system, e.g. by a failure of a database, or a corrupt system. The financial damage is hardly ratable. It starts with the interruption of the working process, then the cost for fixing or restoring the failed system, data loss, loss of image and might end with missed orders (e.g. online shops).
What is the solution?
In the internet it is possible to find alternative solutions (called “workarounds”), most of them trigger a shutdown of multiple systems by script. For using this kind of solution a lot of knowledge is needed. Creating these scripts further takes a lot of time and includes the risk of storing the login data in an unencrypted way.
OPMONis will relieve you from many of these worries. Supported by a clear GUI all common UPSs can be administered (independency from manufacturers). Also all common systems like Windows. Linux, XenServer, ESXi, Hyper-V and others can be controlled, while sensible information as login data is safely encrypted.
