Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

The holidays are truly the most wonderful time of the year. Are you looking to cozy up with loved ones to roast chestnuts over an open fire or simply enjoy the warmth that only the indoors can provide against these harsh, winter conditions? If you’re an IT administrator or technician, you know the great burden of power outages – the greatest of them all being that they don’t care what time of the year it is to surprise you with a lump of coal – or in other words, an unexpected failure. In that case, you could risk having to sacrifice this jolly time of the year to attend to redundant technical issues.

You want to find the perfect balance between convenient, secure and rapid control of your connected servers, network equipment or security devices, but without the hassle of having to manually do it – especially when some travel great lengths to spend time with family, where the option may not even exist. The solution is simple: Remote Power Managers (RPMs).

Remote power management solutions make it easy for, say, an IT administrator who is away from the office to quickly and easily resolve these sticky situations without having to physically attend to the issue. For instance, let’s say he or she suddenly gets a text message explaining that a critical server is locked up; if the administrator is a long way from the office – and even worse, traveling – this can be impossible. Additionally, it’s never easy to reboot the system if a device is located in an inconvenient location, especially if there is rough weather and slippery roads out there.

 “A Minuteman RPM eliminates unnecessary service calls to the data center or…inconvenient interruptions,” explained Bill Allen, Director of Marketing at Minuteman UPS/ Para Systems (News - Alert), in a recent video. There are many pluses, too, given that the system can be rebooted from anywhere in the world using a smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC. All they need is an Internet connection.

Furthermore, given the high rate for service calls, the RPM can pay for itself in just one service call. Consider the fact that a service call to reboot a locked up device at a remote location costs about $350 per hour.

Not only are RPMs easy to set up, but they come in two, eight or 16 port models – all which let users control up to 128 devices remotely.

Bottom line: Remote power management solutions lead to increased efficiency, productivity and lower costs.

Each Minuteman RPM product connects to the network via a CAT5 connection, according to the company’s website. Connected devices can be monitored, controlled and managed via a secure Web interface. RPMs can also provide regularly scheduled shutdowns and startups, leading to lower energy use.

Remember too that RPMs are needed year-round. TMCnet’s Allison Boccamazzo recently reported on a CA (News - Alert) Technologies survey which revealed that businesses experience about 14 hours of annual IT downtime during which they lose $26.5 billion of revenue, or $150,000 per business surveyed. In addition, Ponemon Institute’s (News - Alert) “National Survey on Data Center Outages” further showed that 95 percent of companies experience unplanned downtime in general.

So give yourself and your company a well-needed holiday present this month by exploring remote power management solutions. An RPM is a useful and practical gift – and it doesn’t even need to be gift-wrapped.

To learn more about all of Minuteman’s offerings, visit www.minutemanups.com.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.