In a country like South Africa, security systems are essential to protecting the assets of any individual or business. And uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) are essential to ensuring that those security systems remain fully operational.
Gary Jameson, country manager: South Africa, Eaton Power Quality, says that in this age of critical computing systems and the Internet, business continuity requires that you protect your infrastructure from all the hidden threats of the typical facility environment.
“Every business, no matter how small or large is at risk,” he says. “Take power, for instance. You may only notice power disturbances when the lights flicker or go out, but your PCs, servers, network equipment and security systems can be damaged by many other power anomalies that are invisible to the human eye, and that degrade equipment over time.”
With the right power monitoring system, a company can protect its vital systems while optimising the power delivery infrastructure for efficiency and lower cost.
With a realtime, unified view of power and facilities systems, organisations can proactively manage power quality to enhance the availability and service life of IT and security equipment. Monitoring options are available for organisations of any size. You can remotely monitor and manage a single UPS, an enterprise-wide network of many UPS’ and power distribution devices, or a complete support infrastructure, including generators, environmental systems and detection devices, and other components from multiple vendors.”
The most rigorous redundancy means nothing if you lose the power to run it all, even briefly. Invisible power anomalies can damage sensitive components and cause malfunctions in crucial equipment and processes. “How much current is your equipment drawing right now? Are electrical circuits approaching capacity, ready to trip a breaker if transaction processing rises or a new component is added? Would you be able to see trouble coming? You need to be able to monitor and communicate with components of the power protection and distribution system from anywhere, any time,” he says.
This is where power monitoring systems come in, by providing for:
* Power assurance — The ability to see the health and status of power distribution, power quality and backup power systems from anywhere.
* Visibility into power conditions — Delivering the detailed and aggregated information needed to prevent tripped circuits, understand where new systems can be deployed, balance loads and diagnose power problems.
* Energy efficiency — Understanding the overall power usage effectiveness, and using that knowledge to better manage server utilisation, peak utilisation, power factor, UPS efficiency, heat management and more.
* Energy cost allocations — Tracking the power consumption of the facility to confirm the accuracy of utility billing, and tracking the power consumption of departments, business entities or collocation customers so they can be billed for the energy they use.
* Proactive planning — Being able to identify trends, perform capacity planning, plan a logical power evolution path and head off trouble or a capacity bottleneck before it occurs.</i>
“Naturally, companies will vary in the degree to which they must have visibility and control over the power infrastructure,” says Jameson. “The power monitoring architecture can be as simple or as complex, as high-level or granular as a business needs, simply by choosing where in the power infrastructure to deploy monitoring systems.”
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