This is a very good solution for your UPS and battery needs for a data center electrical solution. The interface is user-friendly and alerts can be understood clearly. The alarms for service and maintenance keep you on the schedule and avoid any downtimes or performance degradations. I am especially impressed with the servicing from APC, we had a battery bank renewal activity recently and it was done very professionally, like clockwork.
We use it in our many communication closets at our various locations and it does the job it needs to do by providing power during an outage and keeping devices online. It is also great as it sends email alerts on power failure and power resumption that get sent directly to our helpdesk system to track outages for reporting purposes.
Notifications are fantastic. In the event of a power outage the email notifications are quick and easy to set up.
The web based GUI is pretty intuitive and easy to use.
The ability to combine these devices with other Schneider (formerly APC) devices is great. We use a number of older Netbotz systems. This makes it very easy to pull reports to give an overall picture. For example: The power went out at 7:00PM. This caused the UPS to kick on. During that time the air conditioning turned off and the server room temperature went up 10 degrees. You can then take this data to those responsible for HVAC and determine best course of action. This is hypothetical of course but you can see the benefit.
I have never had to actually call for support on these devices. The engineer that came to do the initial install was incredibly professional and knowledgeable. She was obviously an expert in the field. At one point we decided to replace all the batteries to ensure battery runtime. That was incredibly easy and did not need to call
We have only used APC/Schneider devices in the past simply because they are the most proven devices of this kind on the market. Like I said previously you cannot trust any unproven device in this kind of emergency scenario. I am not interested in exploring second-tier battery backups.
We also used APC in the past, but in our last refresh moved to Tripp Lite SmartPro. Performance-wise, APC did the job the same as the Tripp Lite SmartPro, but we had issues with APC local vendors and APC support, in general, so we decided to switch to another brand, which ended up with us using Tripp Lite SmartPro.
The positive impact as we were able to identify when a power outage was the reason for remote sites going offline without having to physically check devices.
Having a UPS meant we were able to keep the servers and switches operational as well as end-users avoiding downtime.
