Eaton UPS Reviews

Our primary use case is mission-critical: data centers, communication closets, building automation systems, our utility plants. All our critical systems are run on Eaton.

Our organization has over 20 three-phase units. We've got the 9395s and a 9355s, the 480V three-phase and the 120V three-phase.  Looking forward to leveraging 93PM and the next generation of products

Their UPSs do their job. The argument goes that you find out that UPSs fail when you need them. Knowing these units are going to work allows me to sleep at night. I have a proven track record with them. They just always work. I've never had a problem, not power glitches, nothing. That is exactly what they're supposed to do. 

UPSs are supporting critical load for data center colocation, and that is true across our national portfolio. We run real estate, but our real estate is "critical-load real estate." We've got data center floors that we lease space out to for IT companies. Those IT companies can be using a rack - a single equipment cabinet - or they can be 25,000 square feet of a data center hall for their enterprise. It's a mixed environment, although we try to specialize at each of our locations in a certain sweet spot. We also have shelf space that we lease to companies, large companies which come in and bring their own UPSs and run that space themselves. It's a good world to be in. I learned by watching some of our customers doing things that were mistakes. I get to learn from their mistakes.

In Denver, we've got four strings. Each string has four 750 kVA UPS modules. I'm using them in Cleveland as well. I've got three systems there, and each system has three 750 kVA modules.

Our organization has always had UPSs; that's part of the business that we do and we do rely on UPSs. Each of our locations, at some point during the year, switches over to UPS before we transition to generators. They are used actively every year. Our organization functions by supplying UPS.

I've got a critical-load bill from the utility here in Denver which runs about $130,000 monthly. That critical-load ESS mode moves us from 92 percent efficiency in the UPS to 99 percent efficiency in the UPS. It saves me a seven percent delta between my UPSs which are running pretty much all of that $130,000. It equates to about $11,000 monthly that it saves me if I'm in ESS.

Also, the inherent functionality of a UPS is that you're running your load on batteries. Utilities across the country these days are very dirty, more so on the brownout side than on the spike side, but computer equipment doesn't like unsteady power. So for our customers, it saves them a good amount of money in the failure rate from the equipment that's plugged into the UPSs because they're getting a steady load, steady power.

The way to look at it would be is if we did not have a UPS. If we had to switch over to generators from the utility power, there would be outages. Each one of our contracts with our customers has service level agreements that guarantee 100 percent power availability. Just considering our Denver facility, it has had 100 percent power availability since 1997. It's the integrity that the UPS provides the company that allows us to lease the space that we lease for colocation customers.

We use PredictPulse and the more information I can have from a predictive standpoint, the better I am at preparing my customers. When I talk about 100 percent availability, that is including any maintenance windows. Both our "A" and our "B" power sides are always 100 percent energized. When we do work, we transition from one system and put that load on the surviving system. It is a process. It is not something that can happen quickly, and it takes a lot of planning. In any kind of situation where I can get more information from the machine, telling me that something's going to need to be replaced before it actually fails, the greater the advantage I have in preparing the process for transition.

The units we have are for our data center. We have a data center that needs to be up 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The three Eaton units make up half of our two-end power structure.

It's pretty straightforward that these are battery backups. The job of these units is that if we have a power outage, they carry the full load of all of our IT equipment until the generator kicks in.

In our organization, we have not only IT equipment in the data center, but we also talk to equipment throughout the world. We are one of the largest research institutions in our field in the world. We have pieces of equipment all over the world that actually call and talk to equipment in our data center. If we have downtime, there is the potential to lose very expensive assets that are in the field. We really have to be able to trust in the products that we select for this environment. It's one thing if people can't work for a couple of hours. That's terrible and there's a huge monetary value attached to it. But it's another thing if you lose $10 million in equipment, gear, and assets.

Our data center has been up for as long as I've been in charge of it. We haven't had any downtime in eight years. That's the best. A lot of that is the the people that own these units. By way of analogy, a Toyota is very reliable as long as you take it for oil changes. You stop taking your car for oil changes, things are going to die. There's no perfect product out there, but if you stay with the manufacturer recommendations for stuff and the schedules for maintenance, they're going to last forever.

The solution's heat dissipation capabilities allow it to be located near equipment racks without concern about hotspots. It's a square-footage thing. If you can put them in row, then you don't have to build a separate room for stuff and that separate room can be used for a person, storage, anything. 

It services two data centers and critical infrastructure computing devices.

In the wintertime, we're subject to a lot of pretty severe weather conditions. We have our UPS system with its battery backup, plus we also have a generator. When you're constantly going to get brownouts and all-out power failures, where the city generator and our building generator may have to kick on, in front of all that equipment is our data center with its networks, servers, routers, switches, firewalls, information security, and data. Every time there is a power hiccup, this puts that equipment at significant risk. Having the Eaton system in place really tempers that whole environment and disruptive nature of trying to provide clean power. It delivers to all that equipment good clean power to protect and provide the service. 

There can be some type of power disruption about once a month, 12 times a year. If we did not have the Eaton system in place, we may not lose everything. But every time there's a power hiccup, we might lose some piece of equipment that won't come up properly. At the very least, when those systems would go down, people will not be able to access services. Then, our technical folks will have to come in and try to get systems to come back up gracefully. The Eaton system minimizes the exposure and risk of all those power outages. Without the Eaton system, if you looked at the customer impact, it would be huge because we have 1,000 or more people accessing those services which would be at least temporarily offline until we got them back up and running. 

We use them for network backup or lab backup. These are critical environments for us, environments that we want to keep up in case of loss of power. They have high business impact. We have about 100 Eaton UPSs deployed.

The versions we are currently using that are the new standard are the 93PMs. But we have used all the other ones, the 9390s, the 95s, the 9350s, the 9355s - almost their whole product line.

They provide us reliable battery backup. They also provide energy savings that other units may not provide.

We have instances all the time where we are glad that we have UPSs. There are usually utility problems here or there. We're a pretty large campus and we're pretty spread out throughout the Puget Sound area. Whenever there's a utility event, we're glad we have battery backup through Eaton's units. In the last two months, we've had three utility power events where we had to go to battery. All 100 of the Eaton UPSs did their job and kept the equipment online that we want online. If the UPSs weren't in place, we would've lost power to revenue-generating spaces or to critical environments that need to stay up. That would impact the business and impact our ability to do our jobs.

The savings, by not being down, in terms of impact on revenue, is probably in the millions of dollars a year. It's a tough number to pin down for us. There are some places where it's a network location and there isn't much of an impact on anybody; just the network goes down and there's an issue of productivity for an entire building. But then you have a lab that is being backed up, a lab that generates $1,000,000 every five minutes and that's kind of hard to equate. So the actual savings could go back and forth. I would feel comfortable saying millions a year in savings or in business-impact avoidance.

We use them for our data center backup and our telecommunications equipment room (TER) and our TER backups for our data systems. We use Centralized UPS for all of our telecom rooms and in our data centers and TERs, as well as throughout our facility and hospitals buildings.

We currently have four units and are getting ready to swap out a GE unit, putting an Eaton in, then we will have five units in total.

We are using both the 9395 and 93PM versions.

In our new hospital building, the compressors went bad in one of our MRI units. The vendor who is under maintenance contract for those claimed that the compressor failures were due to power surges into the facility, but we didn't have any data logs of this anywhere else except for in the UPS. The log data for the UPS is fed from the same branch system as the compressors for the MRIs, so we were able to go back and look at all the Eaton data logs of whenever they said that this event occurred. It did not show any information there. We were able to use that information to argue against the vendor that we did not have any bad power coming into the building. We also had our power company provide documentation saying that they did not report any bad power coming to us, as well. We have a direct circuit from our substations, so they are able to monitor from the substation. Between the two of them, we were able to save our facility $40,000 in service costs that the vendor was trying to make us pay for.

Eaton has a lot of reputable years in the data center industry, giving out UPSs to massive data centers. We really rely on these units to ensure that we have no power interruptions. They have a proven track record. Personally, I use them because we have experienced a lot of close calls, where Eaton UPSs saved my infrastructure from any type of downtime.

We have a monitoring software that I am not very familiar with, which just landed on my lap recently. All the global offices for our corporate data center (300-plus locations), a lot of these closets have PDUs in them. I do know some of them are Eaton products, but the majority of them are different. 

In my world, we use a little bit of everything. We have our PD UPSs, which are our uninterrupted power supply units. We have the UPS internally to the data center as well as PDUs, so we have UPSes in a lot of our server cabinets.

We have our bigger unit, a 300kVA unit, which is a lot bigger and not a rack-mountable unit. These are standalone frames. If we went into a smaller UPS design, I would consider having a rack-mountable UPS. However, the way certain of my data centers are designed, it has made more sense to have a frame UPS in place, as opposed to a rack-mountable UPS.

Considering the drastic changes our data center has taken in the past five years, Eaton has been able to accommodate a lot of our needs, e.g., remote monitoring.

My team knows how to respond to the actual monitors. If they get an alert, and it is a critical one, they automatically place a call in immediately with our vendor. Obviously, they notify us. 

I believe that every industry today should put a remote monitoring solution in place. You need to have a business continuity backup plan, as opposed to having onsite people. I believe remote monitoring is going to be the way of the future for a lot of data centers.

We have distribution centers. Our newer distribution centers have regular UPS's in them from Liebert. But we have two distribution centers that are older and we keep a small amount of network gear and server gear at those locations, two racks' worth usually. We use the Eaton UPS to support those racks. We can't have our power going down just because of a blip. 

They mostly support our Cisco, HP, and Dell gear. We have one UPS in one rack and one UPS in the other rack. They're set up to always be redundant.

The alternative was to put in a large UPS at a couple of locations, which we didn't have room for. So the Eaton solution made my life a lot nicer. I have found something that I can rely on, and I know the installation is easy.

We have not seen any hot spots. We monitor all locations through Environet and we have not seen any issues with these causing hotspots or in-rack heat. That was a concern with the first install we did, because we basically had to install it in a closet. Once we got through that one, and it was okay, we never thought about it again.

It has also saved us a fair amount of rack space.