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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 04/05/04 issue

Power protectors

By John Breeden II, GCN Staff

Seven UPS knights keep data out of the dark

People on the downtown Washington office block that houses GCN recently lost hundreds of productive hours to a one-second power failure. People yelled and pulled their hair as their unsaved computer work vanished into the ether. Me? I didn’t even notice. My work was protected by an uninterruptible power system.

The UPS at your feet or in the server room is easily the least-thought-about component of your network. Like insurance, it only comes into play when something goes wrong. And, like insurance, if you don’t have one you will eventually pay the price.

For this review, the GCN Lab tested UPSes from seven leading vendors. Each vendor had our exact test bed description and was asked to submit an appropriate unit for evaluation of run time, software management and value.

The lab actually set up two test beds with similar voltage requirements. The first consisted of two servers and an LCD monitor. The second had three desktop clients and an LCD. I calculated run time as the average time each network kept going after a total power loss.

Surge urge

American Power Conversion Corp. is probably the most recognizable name in the UPS business, and its entry, the APC Smart-UPS 1500, showed why.

The floor unit had eight battery-protected plugs, more than any other in this review. At first, that seemed like overkill for a non-rackmount unit. I wondered whether users might be tempted to overload a shoebox-sized UPS with so many plugs.

But the Smart-UPS was a powerful competitor, keeping both test networks up for a surprisingly long 52 minutes—the second-longest run in the review.

The Smart-UPS 1500 comes standard with APC’s PowerChute Business Edition 6.0 software, which lets users see all the UPS devices on a network but manage only the APC unit.

The software was designed for small to midsize networks. Anything larger requires APC’s Web/SNMP Management Card, which can open a gateway to the power-protected network from anywhere.

I found the software easy to use with an intuitive graphical interface.

Priced for the government at a reasonable $238, the APC has plenty of plugs, excellent management software and incredible run time. It earned an A+ and a Reviewer’s Choice designation.