On May 7th a powerful wind storm blew through the Southern Ontario region. This unexpected wind saw gusts of up to 120 KM per hour and cut power to just under 500,000 people in the area.
On April 15th, the city of Toronto was hit with an ice storm that led to several flight cancelations and power outages to more than 11,000 people.
And, last Christmas Day in Nova Scotia, the power company there activated emergency operations because of a weather system moving through the province. This affected more than 150,000 businesses for a total of 57,000 minutes according to Eaton’s BlackOut Tracker report.
According to Jodi Bonham, the channel manager for Eaton, a manufacturer of uninterruptible power supplies or UPS, these are all examples of power outages that are out of your control that are a testament to why UPSs are so important in protecting important infrastructure and data.
In the EChannelNews podcast, Bonham said that “no one has a crystal ball” for these types of occurrences and this is why channel partners should not forget power and cooling technology when delivering a small business solution or a data centre solution.
Approximately, 59 per cent of Fortune 500 companies experience a minimum of 1.6 hours of downtime per week that could cost these large firms more than $896,000 per week or $46 million annually given staff wages and benefits.
“If the tools you have to do your job are not workable there is no revenue coming in and that is disruptive to most businesses where they are Fortune 500 or a small to mid-size business,” she said in during the podcast.
Power outages can be caused by a number of different things most of which are physical that humans can detect. But, then there are these anomalies with the delivery of utility power that are not detectable by humans. These anomalies in power disruption can be found by a UPS system. UPS’s provide a complete battery backup when the electricity is gone.
“This is what UPS provides; it provides insurance,” Bonham said. There are other anomalies such as power sags or surges like harmonic distortion and frequency variance of how electricity is delivered. UPSs protect you from these along with all those unknown things. This is the insurance of a UPS; to protect the infrastructure and your day-to-day operation.”
In the podcast, Bonham was asked about Eaton’s vendor alliance partnerships with Nutanix, Cisco and others, why its pivoting towards software and the company’s overall channel strategy.
