It is astounding to think that many servers in small businesses are plugged directly into the wall for power without any protection from outages or dirty electric current. It is easy to mitigate up to 44% of data loss incidents that are due to hardware failure by providing clean and consistent power to servers on the network. Installing a server battery backup is quite easy to do and the possible return on investment will never be seen due to the possible issues being taken care of. Here is a basic list of best practices for purchasing and setting up the monitoring software that comes with the unit:
Server Battery Backup Purchasing:
- Budget to purchase new battery backup devices every 5-6 years
- Replace internal battery on unit at the 3 year mark
- Based on maximum load (think power supply total watts) select an Uninterupted Power Supply (UPS) that will not be loaded over 80% which protects the unit from undue wear and allows for some growth
- Consider redundant UPS configuration for larger servers with multiple power supplies
- In high production environments, consider adding an UPS for each workstation to allow for file saves before file server shutdown occurs.
Server Battery Backup Setup:
- Make sure buildings elecrical breakers are rated to handle the 80-100% load of the UPS
- If single UPS used in multiple power supply server scenario then put one plug into the wall and the other into the UPS, but please consider redundant power supplies.
- Plug in serial, usb or network management and install the management software that comes with it
- Configure the management software to gracefully shutdown the Operating System (OS) of all connected servers
- If using sequential shutdown of servers then shutdown database servers first, file servers second and domain controllers last.
- Configure either SNMP alerting or email alerting to get status updates from the device
- Configure regular self-test of the battery to make sure there is no failure of the internal battery before the replacement period
Taking the time to do this right the first time will save headaches later when things go wrong. Call or email us to do an evaluation of your power infrastructure.