Most IT professionals unprotected from power outages

Almost 60% of IT professionals believe their networks have inadequate protection from future power outages, according to a recent survey conducted on behalf of American Power Conversion.

The research was carried out in May and comprises over 300 responses from IT-decision makers, including CIOs, IT directors, IT managers and facilities managers. The findings show that 50.3% of respondents were concerned about the condition of the National Grid and 64.3% said their business had experienced a power outage in the last 12 months.

The APC managing director for UK and Ireland, Michael Adams, said the results were a wake-up call for many businesses. “Trends such as consolidation and compaction, bringing with them the large-scale deployment of multiple racks of ultra-compact blade servers, may reduce the demand for data centre real estate but they dramatically increase heat density and, with that, the requirement for forced air cooling.

“Companies will need to look at the bigger picture, otherwise problems at the physical layer will start to show in equipment failures and reduced availability. For example, a simple question that needs to be asked is have we got the air-conditioning system condensers on power back-up along with the servers and switches? It was exactly this situation that saw last year’s power cut bring IT users in cities like New York to their knees.”

For more on how to protect data centres from power outages, see the July issue of Electrical Review.