Alternative Power

WEST KINGSTON, RI -- When storm clouds roll across Kansas, WiFi (News - Alert) users at the Frisky Brisket hot spot in Phillipsburg are no longer worried about losing Internet connections. They used to be subject to the woes associated with intermittent service disruptions because their ISP, Nex-Tech, frequently suffered power outages that wiped out hard drives and servers.

 

“Let me tell you, when you have 30,000 people who don’t receive their email due to lost power, they are not very forgiving,” said Lance Bickle, Internet Technology Specialist at Nex-Tech, a subsidiary of Rural Telephone.

 

To help, Nex-Tech turned to American Power Conversion (News - Alert) (APC) and its flagship InfraStruXure line of power protection and cooling systems. Eight years ago, the UPS vendor branched out from its core component (box) business to large-scale, rack systems power protection and cooling solutions – a market segment that remains relatively untouched by competitors such as Tripp Lite and Belkin.

 

“We call it Network-Critical Physical Infrastructure,” Aaron Davis, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at APC, explained last week at a media gathering at the company’s headquarters. “APC is in a very unique position because of our broad horizontal presence.”

 

On June 26, APC announced that its InfraStruXure system is now integrated with a Smart-UPS VT power module, hot-swappable batteries and integrated power distribution, offering a quick-connect component architecture that decreases total-cost-of-ownership (TCO).  The new InfraStruXure with Smart-UPS VT is ideal for server rooms and small data centers as well as for remote locations including regional offices. The systems are available in 20KVA and 30KVA, with 208V and 480V input and are now available in North America and in July for most countries worldwide.

 

“The system's high power density, small form factor and modular architecture make it ideal for applications ranging from high density, disaster recovery and VoIP/IP telephony,” said Dwight Sperry, APC's vice president of Enterprise Systems and Business Networks.

 

TCO considerations aside, InfraStruXure’s real value proposition may yet prove to be its reliability and performance with service providers like Nex-Tech. “We turned to APC Global Services for help since we used the smaller Smart-UPS® and they were always rock solid for us,” Bickle said.

 

“The InfraStruXure solution ensures 100 percent uptime protecting everything from DNS servers, Email servers, Web servers, NAS devices, Routers, Switches, to Wireless Tower sites. Now when we are struck by storms, we aren’t awake all night worrying if we need to drive to the central office to shut machines down before something fails. Not only that, with the InfraStruXure Manager, it is almost like having another IT person on staff alerting us when there are problems because we receive notifications and phone calls through this remote monitoring solution,” he added.

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.