UPS as a ‘Significant Investment’ in Power Protection for Data Centers

A new report from Vertiv reminds readers that have invested in an uninterruptible power supply — or UPS — that they have made a “significant investment” in power protection for their operations. With such an investment, it’s crucial to use batteries that are reliable and work well with your product. “Your system availability depends on a working battery,” the new Vertiv report reminds readers.

UPS batteries are normally able to provide several years of service, “operating reliably even through repeated charging and occasional use while supporting critical loads,” according to the report.

But just like any battery, they have a regular lifecycle.

“The key challenge is to know when your batteries are nearing the end of their life expectancy and to be able to replace them before you get into a situation — such as a complete power outage — where they fail to protect the load,” Vertiv explains.

Enter single-phase UPS units, which are used by many mission-critical applications, including servers, critical nodes, network workstations, large network peripherals, network routers, bridges and hubs, as well as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), safety/security, and point-of-sale (POS) systems. 

These are smaller UPS systems, that according to the report rang in capacity from 500 VA up to 20,000 VA, and are common in organizations having edge or remote computing locations. These are often common for education, banking, healthcare, retail, industrial, and/or government organizations. 

“When it comes to small or remote IT edge installations, out of sight is certainly not out of mind, especially with their vital role in meeting business and customer demands. This is why a dedicated battery lifecycle management program is so important.” — Vertiv

According to the report, a battery management program should do the following:

• Battery maintenance to ensure that batteries are operating at peak performance;
• It should also alert IT personnel when a battery is nearing time for replacement. 

Further, the management program can enable oversight of the UPS itself. This is especially important, since often, as a small UPS gets older, it can sometimes be a better move to replace the unit instead of just making another battery replacement.

Similar to an older PC or server, the report reminds readers the older a UPS system, “the greater the risk of unanticipated failure.”

Download the full report from Vertiv, “Single-Phase UPS Lifecycle Management: Protecting IT Availability,” which highlights the critical role of the battery within single-phase UPS systems and discusses the options for ensuring power and business continuity, especially as IT networks increase in size and complexity and/or become more dispersed.