Be prepared when disaster strikes

Are You Prepared?

72% of critical applications undergo an average of nine hours of power downtime per year... what about yours? Can you afford it and what is it going to cost your business?

The purposes of this document are to document proactive steps that can be taken to minimise the impact of unplanned services outages and to discuss some elements of general systems availability.

When power outage is not addressed, there can be a loss of services and data as well as possible equipment damage, resulting in a longer unplanned services outage. Many companies incur serious loss of business, profits and customer satisfaction with even short periods of unplanned services interruption.

The UPS

While redundant servers are a commonly used preventative measure to ensure that processing is not completely halted by the failure of one machine and raid arrays help to eliminate the problems caused by a single disk failure, a whole cluster of servers and their attached raid storage will be useless if their electrical supply is disrupted for any reason.

Most companies use some sort of uninterruptible power supply, commonly referred to as a UPS, to support their computer systems. These range from small battery backup units that will power a single desktop computer long enough to allow work-in-progress to be saved, to large industrial units that support complex server farms and allow for an orderly shutdown of systems to prevent data loss and long restart periods. These devices may also provide another critical function, which is to condition the incoming mains current to prevent dangerous surges and spikes from reaching sensitive equipment.

Having redundant UPSs is important, but so is having cross wired power supplies. The best configuration is to have two UPSs running at less than 50% capacity providing power to each and every piece of equipment. Therefore if one UPS fails, then the other has both the capacity and the connections to sustain business operations (albeit for a reduced period of time).

Size matters

A common error is to undersize the capacity of the UPS. Calculating the capacity of the UPS required by your installation is possible using our online UPS calculator from MGE, but all manufacturers will have their own clearly defined recommendations based on the power requirements of the equipment to be connected to them. It is far better to have surplus capacity than too little. Under sizing can result in damage to the dependant equipment or failure of the UPS to function at all, plus the cost of replacing inadequate equipment is usually higher than the cost of purchasing oversized equipment to begin with.

Click here to find out what a power outage will cost your company

Switches and Routers

Network appliances such as switches and routers are often overlooked when it comes to provision of a secure supply of power. However, loss of power to these devices can wreak havoc. If a switch or router loses power, an entire segment of the network may fail. Heavily trafficked routers on large networks may require long periods of time to rebuild their routing tables and become functional again when power is restored, or worse still, may remember and propagate no longer current routing information causing wide spread network corruption and failure. It is vital to remember these devices when designing your UPS installations.

Questions to Consider

Some good questions to ask when assessing what levels of uptime you need are:

1. How dependant is my organisation on its computer systems to perform its business functions?
2. How much downtime can my organisation withstand before it causes an unacceptable level of lost productivity, profitability and customer satisfaction?
3. Are there well defined and documented procedures in place for manually performing our business functions in the event of prolonged downtime?
4. How does the cost of downtime compare to the cost of high availability?

Keep in mind that the period of time that the electrical supply is actually off is not by any means the total time that your systems may be unavailable. A server, disk array or database may require hours to come back online after an improper shutdown. Network appliances may require protracted periods of time to renegotiate and restore communications. Individual workers may have lost unsaved work.
All the above may seriously impact overall productivity and have a tremendous associated cost.

MGE UPS

MGE UPS Systems is a world leader in providing high quality power solutions that increase power availability and system uptime to PCs and enterprise-wide networks, mission-critical telecommunication systems, and industrial/manufacturing processes.

MGE's comprehensive product offering includes Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs), inverters, rectifiers, power management software, active harmonic conditioners, and surge suppressors that provide MGE's customers with end-to-end infrastructure solutions.

MGE are the choice of UPS for many of the worlds largest and most high profile companies including: Apple, Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, BBC, Time Warner, FBI, Pfizer, Roche, Bayer, BT, Nokia, Lloyds, Amazon.com and Yahoo to name a few.

Their UPS solutions can cover a home users, small offices, enterprise networks, telecoms, data centres and process & infrastructures, are of the highest international standards and officially approved by all major manufacturers including Microsoft, Mac and Linux.
MGE are able to offer you IT Week quotes: "the MGE Pulsar ESV 22+, a superb machine which comes with management software that is both easy to use and informative".

Next Step

Whether you are already covered or not, you may wish to find out more about the potential risk to your company and what UPS cover may cost. You may wish to test and check current arrangements and potential of your UPS system and assess your risk management and Disaster Recovery Plan.
Hardware.com supplies the full MGE catalogue of products. Online, we also provide:

• Online Risk Assessor - helping you to weigh up the risk associated with possible hardware damage, file/data loss, system stop, reload time, component damage, financial losses, operating errors, loss of productivity and customer dissatisfaction.
• Downtime Cost Calculator - quantifying the potential value of loss of sales, salary costs and customer loss.
• Product Configurator - aligning the correct UPS solution to your network demands/downtime risks.

Our dedicated Product Management team can help you with any queries you have - great or small - call us now on 0800 0830 646 or visit MGE.

Call 0800 0830 646 to protect your business today

The 'Nines'

The 'nines' scale of availability has long been a standard for measuring not only the amount of time in which a system must be available (uptime), but also the amount of time in which it may be unavailable (downtime), for maintenance or unplanned outages. Many companies pay a premium for their systems and attendant maintenance in order to be guaranteed high availability. The more 'nines' in the rating, the higher the level of availability: and conversely, the lower the allowable downtime. The actual downtime may surprise you. Per non-leap year:

• 90.0% uptime = 36 days and 12 hours of downtime per year
• 99.0% uptime = 3 days, 15 hours and 36 minutes of downtime per year
• 99.9% uptime = 8 hours, 46 minutes of downtime per year
• 99.99% uptime = 52 minutes and 33 seconds of downtime per year
• 99.999% uptime = 5 minutes, 15 seconds of downtime per year
• 99.9999% uptime = 31.5 seconds of downtime per year

Obviously few systems will achieve 99.9999% uptime, although five 'nines', or 99.999% is often achieved in telephone or banking systems. While your company may not require such a high level of availability, it also probably cannot survive with 90 or 99% uptime either. Even 99.9% will be problematic for companies that rely heavily on their computer systems in the performance of their day-to-day business functions.

APC Vs. MGE Cross-Reference Table

• Red colour: local receptacles (British Standard/BS)
• MGE solutions in italics means a different UPS technology than the compatible APC model
• Please note that Smart UPS 750 and 1000 RM 2U are not compatible with 600 mm depth rack cabinet.