Not Down With Backups?

The great blackout of 2003--when a large expanse of the Northeast lost power for the better part of an afternoon and brought cities like New York to a standstill--surely raised everyone's understanding of the stakes involved in keeping a power backup plan in place, right?

And surely, when news stories, studies and investigations after that blackout produced startling information about the state of the national power grid and how much renovation would be needed to ensure power reliability, that raised the understanding of the need for power backup, right?

Oh, and massive hurricanes that have hit the U.S. year after year throughout the past decade, some powerful, all disruptive, have also done wonders to improve the public's awareness of the importance of backing up power, right?

Amazingly, despite these previous problems, that has not been the case.

Consider a recent study undertaken by Emerson Network Power, the parent of power supply company Liebert Corp., Columbus, Ohio. In a survey of 451 small businesses, it found among other curious statistics that 61 percent do not have backup power supplies. Other interesting statistics from the survey include:

Seventy-nine percent of small businesses suffered at least one power outage in 2007.

More than two-thirds of small businesses expect to have to deal with another outage during the coming year.

Of those small businesses that did suffer an outage last year, 42 percent had to close their business during the "longest outages."

Power supply vendors have been doing their best to take advantage of the small-business power dynamic (or maybe, more accurately, lack of one) since the 2003 blackout. The segment of IT itself has faced both investment and consolidation as energy, data center consolidation and power supply issues have grown during this decade.

Companies ranging from Paris-based Schneider Electric with its American Power Conversion unit, as well as Emerson Network Power and its Liebert unit, and Eaton Corp., Cleveland, have all been aggressive in working to provide UPS and power backup solutions.

Last month, Emerson rolled out a new version of its small-business power backup solution, the GXT2, which is aggressively priced at about the cost of a low-end, industry-standard server. The Test Center looked at Liebert UPStation GXT2-1000RT12 UPS System and found the following:

The form factor--which can be deployed as either a rack-mount or a tower-install--can fit in well as either a stand-alone power supply or as part of an overall data center solution that can slide neatly into a 2U rack slot.

In a simple test, the GXT2 battery was able to keep two tower servers and two PCs running for about 25 minutes after power was cut to the unit--enough time to provide for switchover to a hosted backup solution or power down ongoing processes. With an add-on, the unit can be managed and monitored remotely across a network; monitoring features include real-time looks at battery charge, input, output and bypass scenarios and active alarms, among other things. The GXT2 unit ships with hot-swappable batteries. It's also a heavy piece of equipment for its size, weighing in at more than 70 pounds.

The Test Center found the unit to be engineered and priced for attractiveness to small-business customers--customers that many solution providers would just as soon not take on without serious attention to this type of backup.