How to Protect Your IT Systems During Power Interruptions

Nowadays, the world seems to experience once-in-a-century storms almost monthly. These cataclysmic weather events often cause extensive property damage, including major disruptions to the power grid that can cripple IT systems. More commonly, human error and power fluctuations can be just as costly and devastating to continued IT service delivery. To avoid costly outages and data loss, businesses must ensure continued operations with power protection delivered by a smart solution like Dell VxRail and the APC by Schneider Electric Smart UPS with PowerChute Network Shutdown software.

If the outage is prolonged, the Dell-APC solution enables remote shut down to protect IT systems and ensure a non-disruptive restart.

When the power goes out, gracefully shutting down connected IT devices — like servers, storage devices, and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) — helps prevent further damage to those devices. It also prevents loss of business data and damage to enterprise workloads and helps ensure a smoother process for restarting and getting the business back up and running.

Why is this so important? Because the cost of downtime can be catastrophic. Estimates of IT service downtime costs range from $80,000 an hour on the lower end of the scale to $5 million an hour for larger enterprises. And that doesn’t account for damage to business reputation — whether a retailer loses its POS systems, or a larger organization loses its online customer service and sales systems.

With so much at stake, a UPS with remote management capabilities is critical to protect the HCI system and workloads it supports. HCI systems, like Dell VxRail, have become the backbone for data centers and larger organizations. HCI has historically been used to support specific workloads like virtual desktops (VDI). However, it has emerged as a workhorse for running mission-critical workloads that require elevated levels of performance and availability. Enterprises should consider deploying an intelligent smart UPS like the Dell-APC PowerChute solution to protect those mission-critical workloads running on HCI.

While HCI is also well-suited for supporting multiple sites, losing power at remote sites can still cause system damage and data corruption. To prevent this type of damage, organizations must install a UPS at every HCI installation. Ideally, the UPS will keep systems operating throughout an outage. However, if an outage lasts too long, businesses must have a process in place to ensure an automated graceful shutdown, followed by a sequenced infrastructure restart. 

To gracefully shut down the HCI, the UPS must be able to communicate over a distributed network. Then it has to initiate a step-by-step restart sequence to ensure hardware and data protection. The automated restart should begin once power is restored. This automated remedy for power interruption can save time and money — and, ultimately, minimize downtime.

Integrated systems like Dell VxRail HCI and the APC by Schneider Electric Smart UPS with PowerChute Network Shutdown software can help businesses simplify and automate the process during catastrophic power outages and ensure business continuity by enabling graceful shutdown and the ability to simply move virtual machines to another system. This level of network protection acts as insurance against catastrophic downtime that could otherwise lead to the loss of all IT services.  

To learn more about how integrated IT solutions like Dell VxRail and the APC by Schneider Electric Smart UPS with PowerChute Network Shutdown software protect business data assets and ensure business continuity, please visit us here.

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