A UPS Is A Necessity

You know you have bad power when:

In the last twelve weeks we have had 13 blackouts and one undervoltage event in that time period.

One of those blackouts was during a fairly crazy storm that jumped on us as we were coming back into St. Albert from Edmonton on St. Albert Trail one Sunday evening.

The lightning strike was absolutely spectacular and the explosion that followed it was just as spectacular and we practically had front row seats! Then almost every single light on the South end of St. Albert went out including the traffic lights.

Some folks did not know how to approach the huge intersection we were approaching just after that event. Six lanes in one direction and four in the other was one big intersection to run as a four way stop in the pitch black and a heavy downpour.

A number of our local clients were impacted by the blackout including the one whose UPS software above.

Our shop was fortunately tied to another substation so we did not lose power there.

All it takes is one spontaneous shutdown of the server due to a power outage or even a hardware failure to completely toast Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, database Line of Business applications, and other components on the SBS server or Windows Servers.

A UPS, we use APC, is a necessity for any server setup. The UPS needs to have sufficient run time to allow all SBS related services to shutdown properly along with the SBS OS.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer