Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

The need for power protection in the form of Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) is continuing to burgeon rapidly, and experts estimate that the global UPS market will grow by $1 billion in 2011, as compared to last year.

Pike Research (News - Alert) expects the market to expand from $7.2 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion in 2011 – growing by 12.2 percent, according to a recent DatacenterDynamics story.

So what is the reason for this sudden surge? The need to protect electronic equipment from instabilities surrounding the power grid and a growing intolerance for downtime as more and more IT infrastructures move into data centers where standards for storage reliability are high.

Recently, downtime has been the subject of a lot of reports as companies all over are falling victim to power outage and surges. This summer, from Amazon to Go Daddy to Microsoft (News - Alert), big players all across the tech space were catching downtime fever about as quickly as they were catching heat stroke.

“As shown in a recent story on CNN, our demand on the aging power grid is greater than ever,” Duston Nixon, marketing communications specialist for power protection company Minuteman UPS/Para Systems (News - Alert), told TMCnet. “Factors like unseasonably warm temperatures and the ever increasing number of electronic devices each of us own mean our current system is stretched to its limits.”

According to the CNN report, experts on the nation's electricity system have highlighted a worrisome fact that there has been a “steep increase” in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers. In fact, during the past two decades, blackouts have increased 124 percent – up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota.

Leading power protection vendors have been responding to the market need by focusing on increasing efficiency through innovation, such as introducing transformer-less UPS systems, according to Pike President Clint Wheelock.

“Advances in battery technology are also benefiting UPS products by reducing cost and floorspace requirements,” he said.

Since average sales value for UPSs have trended downward recently, unit shipment growth will be higher than revenue growth, Wheelock said. While the largest share of all UPS sales continued to be generated by small-capacity systems in the first half of 2011, the large-UPS segment won some market share from the traditionally dominating segment.

In other industry news, power protection leader Minuteman recently released a white paper  called “Powering Your Business Disaster Planning” which delineates the key components of an all encompassing power protection plan – one which proves failproof during short-term power surges or even extended outages. 

“The business community and virtually any other type of organization are highly dependent on continuous, reliable power in order to maintain the availability of servers and network peripherals, telephone systems, and security systems,” commented Bill Allen, director of marketing for Minuteman. “Not much business gets conducted without power, and it’s highly incumbent on these institutions to make sure they have a viable disaster plan in place that includes power availability contingencies.”

To read more about the white paper, click here.