Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

There really is no good time for a power outage to take place, but there are times when it is much worse than others. At 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning is not a good time, especially when the outage affects a courthouse, City Hall and parts of a state university, which is what happened in Boise, Idaho last week.

As reported by Nicole Blanchard on The Idaho Statesman, the power outage was responsible for more than 3,600 customers in Boise to go without power for almost an hour. According to Blanchard, this affected Ada courthouse, Boise City Hall, Boise State University (BSU) and traffic lights in the area.

At 11 a.m., the institutions that were affected by this power outage were very likely carrying out a multitude of tasks, some of which may have been critical. Although the power was restored within the hour, if they didn't have the proper Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) backup system, the data they were working on was more than likely lost.

Today's enterprise line of UPS from Minuteman can protect sensitive electronics, critical servers, network devices, security and phone systems to ensure the safety of all of the equipment that is installed within the premises of an organization. This includes complete protection from spikes, surges, sags, brownouts and blackouts.

They also have communications features with simultaneous RS-232, USB and Ethernet communications. Being able to communicate with the UPS across three different protocols ensures there will at least always be one platform that works so they can manage the UPS from multiple stand-alone or networked computers. This will give administrators access to their equipment with concurrent Ethernet communications (SNMP or direct IP address) for detailed monitoring and management.

As reported by Blanchard, the message from Idaho Power said it was not aware of what caused the outage, but equipment failure is the most likely cause as indicated by the utility’s outage map. This power outage and many like it prove they can take place at any time, and whether you are conducting research at a university or working on a presentation at home, having a UPS system will let you save your work, power down properly and ensure the safety of your computing devices, and, more importantly, the data you have been working on for hours or days.