(9-Oct-09) People in general may have an innate fear of the dark, but for IT managers, this impulse can reach sheer frenzy in a matter of minutes. Very few enterprises are comfortable with the idea of sitting in the dark with all operations halted for any length of time. And the more a company’s operations hinge on 24x7 online access, such as with ecommerce, the more that company is likely to be intolerant of any downtime and will take costly measures to prevent it.
“You’re just trying to carry enough backup power of any type—battery, gen sets, whatever—to keep your server room or data center running long enough to perform an orderly shutdown,” says Darin Stahl, lead analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. “The duration of that runtime is a function of business needs, criticality, and cost, and cost is a derivative of impact to business. I see a lot of SMEs out there using a standalone or a rack battery solution to keep critical servers up for 30, even 45, minutes.”