Product category: UPSs
News Release from: American Power Conversion
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 28 July 2004

Survey highlights insufficient backup power

A new survey has revealed that nearly 60% of UK IT professionals are unconvinced that their networks are adequately protected from power outages

Despite the extensive power outages which wreaked chaos in North America and affected most of Europe last summer, nearly 60% of IT professionals are unconvinced that their networks are adequately protected from future outages, according to a recent survey carried out on behalf of American Power Conversion (APC).

The research fieldwork was carried out in May 2004 and drew over 300 responses from IT decision makers at all levels including CIOs, IT directors, IT managers and facilities managers.

Its findings include that just over half of the respondents (50.3%) were concerned about the state of the National Grid, and 64.3% of respondents revealed that their business had experienced a power outage in the last 12 months.

The survey follows warnings that the UK is seriously in danger of over using electricity supplies.

In the recent BBC2 documentary, "If the lights go out" (10th March 2004), Prof Ian Fells, a key energy advisor to the Government, warned that power failures will become more commonplace as the National Grid fails to cope with the increasing demand for power.

It is widely expected that such power shortages will occur during winter months, but climate change and the increasing use of air conditioning means that the UK could experience US-style outages during the hotter months too.

Michael Adams, APC Managing Director for UK and Ireland, believes that the results are a cause for concern in the light of an increased awareness of, and spending on, business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

"I think these results are a wake up call for many businesses".

"Gone are the days when companies could just take power for granted and those that do will reap the rewards of such complacency".

"Trends such as consolidation and compaction, bringing with them the large-scale deployment of multiple racks of ultracompact blade servers may reduce the demand for data centre real estate, but they dramatically increase heat density and with that, the requirement for forced air cooling".

"Companies will need to look at the bigger picture, otherwise problems at the physical layer will start to show in equipment failures and reduced availability".

"For example, a simple question that needs to be asked is have we got the air conditioning system condensers on power backup along with the servers and switches?".

"It was exactly this situation which saw last years' power cut bring IT users in cities like New York to their knees".

He continues: "For APC the network critical physical infrastructure (NCPI) - the physical layer of the network comprising rack, power, cooling and management services, are absolutely essential to high availability".

"It is clear from the survey results that business continuity is a key IT concern, and we would strongly advise companies to revisit their power protection policies in order to safeguard business against downtime".

APC is offering a free of charge NCPI vulnerability assessment designed to help business highlight areas for improvement.

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