Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

“On Friday, May 20, the OnePartner ATAC datacenter passes a milestone - 1,000 consecutive days of uninterrupted operation,” said Tom Deaderick, director of business development for OnePartner's ATAC data center.

During the spring, businesses were faced with a barrage of catastrophes like tornadoes, fires, floods and the like. When so many of the region's small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) suffer multiple incidents every year, they can come to believe downtime is just unavoidable.

Deaderick says, “Believing there is no other way, they don't bother running the numbers to see how costly these outages are to their business.  They just accept them.” 

According to Minuteman, a leader provider of power protection technologies, SMB owners overlook the benefits afforded by power protection.

According to an Office Depot survey of SMBs, 60 percent of this group does not have adequate power protection installed, nor do they have any type of disaster plan in place, Minuteman’s Marketing Director Bill Allen told TMCnet in a recent interview.

OnePartner is one company that recognizes the importance of uptime.

Located in Duffield, OnePartner's ATAC data center is beyond the 500-year flood plain (the highest rating possible), far from airports, over a mile from a railroad and nestled in a rural town with a small population.  

Before the data center was built, businesses in the region had hardly any option to ensure business continuity in times of calamities. Now with OnePartner’s ATAC data center, every business in the region can move critical computing infrastructure into one of the nation's most robust and Uptime Institute Certified commercial datacenters.

The OnePartner data center is protected against natural disasters in a scientific, yet natural way. The data center is surrounded by mountains on all sides – all of which are more than six feet thick.

“History is full of examples where man's efforts to overcome nature fail,” Deaderick said. “Better to build a data center in an ideal location than try to fit square pegs into round holes.”

Julian Kudritzki, vice president of Uptime Institute, which creates and maintains the Tier Certification system for both private and commercial datacenters, said, “This achievement would not be possible without two factors. First, a Tier III Certified Design, which allows for all work on the data center infrastructure, including equipment replacement, without impacting the IT equipment.”

Kudritzki added that OnePartner's equipment remains in a new or like-new condition. “Only equipment in this condition performs at the highest levels of reliability. Second, such sustained availability is not possible without a disciplined site management program.”

OnePartner has featured a white paper, titled "10 Places You Don't Want a Datacenter."  The white paper lists 10 characteristics which factor into an organization's potential to maintain uninterrupted service.  

Recently OnePartner announced that Eastman Credit Union, with headquarters in Kingsport, Tenn., has established a mirrored infrastructure in the OnePartner ATAC datacenter in Duffield, Virginia.

While the geographic location helped OneParnter achieve this milestone, the right form of power protection can also help companies remain up as well. In fact, Minuteman has a spot on its homepage dedicated to answering the question, “Why is power protection needed?” And, according to the power protection company, the answer is because at any moment you can lose access to your important data.

“Spending as little as a hundred dollars on power protection can buy complete protection and peace of mind,” officials state.