Have you ever wondered why APC (American Power Conversion) UPS systems use the product name “SmartUPS”?
Many people pay little or no attention to their UPS. Although it may not be considered a very exciting piece of equipment, it sits as a foundation of your data center. Not only does the UPS carry your equipment through power outages, dips, brownouts, etc., but it also provides a first line of defense against power spikes and other unwanted power transients that could otherwise damage your equipment.
However, UPS batteries, like brake pads on a car, have a limited lifespan and they need to be checked regularly. Realistically though, there may be closets or locations where you are rarely, if ever, near enough to the UPS to notice that it’s beeping and flashing due to a battery failure. What you and your users (and management) will notice is a reboot of your Ethernet switch stack and the IP phones connected to it or a bank of servers going down during a brief bump in the power. This costs money – not only in terms of loss of productivity, but you may now have to spend hours reloading and restoring systems that did not shut down properly.
So what do you do to make sure your batteries are in good shape? You could schedule periodic walkthroughs to your various closets, but there is a better way.
UPS Management Cards
APC SmartUPS, Symmetra UPS and many other APC products have the ability to accommodate a network management card that connects the unit to an IP/ Ethernet network. The card can provide a wealth of information regarding the health of your UPS, its batteries, the quality of the utility power that is feed the UPS, its power load, and so on. These cards provide a web page which can be viewed securely with a web browser. In fact, the UPS management card can be configured to send emails when critical events take place (such as battery failure) so that you can proactively change out your batteries before the next power event. It can also be monitored by SNMP as well as send log entries to a syslog server.
Environmental Monitoring
Some APC UPS management cards, like the unit shown in the picture, are also capable of remote temperature monitoring so that you can get an idea of the environment in which your equipment is operating and find out questions such as “how warm is the air intake getting at a particular server?”, or “Is the air conditioning at a remote facility being turned off after hours and causing my equipment to overheat?”. It’s interesting to note that keeping environmental temperatures low (i.e.: at normal room temperature) can help increase battery life (up to five years) while higher temperatures can reduce battery life to as little as two years. So ensuring that the environment where your UPS lives stays cool can actually save you money in terms of battery replacement costs. Also, ensuring that the temperature of your environment helps increase uptime of other equipment sharing the same space with the UPS, such as servers, SANs, network equipment, and so forth.
Remote Monitoring Service
SunTel Services can help you setup your UPS management card as well as other equipment such as APC Rack PDUs (intelligent plug strips), APC InRow cooling units, etc. so that you can monitor these devices. However, we can also monitor ANY of your IP-connected equipment around-the-clock with our NetSurety Real-Time monitoring service. Click HERE for more information.
So, if you have a SmartUPS from APC you should consider adding a remote management card to your UPS. If you have an APC Symmetra high-availability, modular UPS, you already have a UPS management card installed in your unit. Are you using it?
Give us a call today and we can help you fully utilize the capabilities of your APC equipment.