Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

These days, it's easy to forget how easily an organization or educational institution can be shut down due to a power outage, even with an event like Hurricane Sandy having occurred so recently. Even not backed by a hurricane, a power outage can be a major disruption to normal operations in most cases.

For example, an outage Tuesday resulted in the entire north campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis shutting down. A message on the campus' website offered only the barest information: "Due to a power outage the UMSL's north campus is closed June 11, 2013. Classes are cancelled. Employees can go home. South campus remains open."

It seems silly that a power outage could shut down a whole university campus and, to an extent, it kind of is; total outages are entirely preventable with battery backup solutions.

In fact, Minuteman offers a whole line of battery backup and surge protection solutions specifically geared toward the government and education sector. These include surge protectors for non-critical components; RackMount UPS models for servers, telecom, VoIP, security systems and other rack systems; the standby EnSpire series for telecommunications and data processing applications; and line interactive Entrust (News - Alert), PRO-LCD, PRO-RT and EnterprisePlus series uninterruptable power supplies for small to medium sized network and security devices.

Finally, Minuteman's Endeavour UPS offerings are capable of powering enterprise-wide systems for multiple hours of backup battery runtime.

All models in the Endeavour Series come standard with internal batteries, allowing them to protect critical devices through extended blackouts like the one that hit the University of Missouri-St. Louis' north campus. In fact, this series leverages external battery packs which can be daisy-chained in unlimited quantities, allowing for a virtually unlimited amount of runtime.

With these products together, educational institutions can run more or less indefinitely on backup power, but at the very least would be able to hold out for an entire school day.