Name: Schneider Electric Smart-UPs
Rating: 9 (5 reviews)
Author: Schneider Electric

March 23, 2020

The Smart(UPs) Choice

Brandon Burch

Coordinator of Network and Technical Services

Hudson Falls Central School District (Education Management, 201-500 employees)

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization we have many Schneider Electric Smart-UPs devices to ensure power to our data center facilities. The devices have been completely reliable throughout the years. The reporting and notification features have been extremely useful in dealing with random power issues (both due to outside and inside problems). You can also combine these devices with add-on software to combine with Netbotz systems. This gives you an overall picture of your environmental variables (power, temp, dew point, humidity, etc).

Pros and Cons

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.
Replacing the batteries is extremely easy.

The LCD screen on the models we use is very small and often you need to scroll through many pages to see the full message.
Battery run time is fairly accurate but you really need to keep an eye on it in the event of an emergency. I understand this is typical but it's worth noting.
Not sure if newer models have this but SMS notifications would be great.

Likelihood to Recommend

In emergency situations these devices are crucial. Schneider has been in the business for a long time. Power conditioning and battery backups are not things you trust to devices or companies that are unproven. In 12 years I have not had an issue with the reliability or longevity of these devices.

Return on Investment

They have saved our environment countless times. We have a history of power outages in our area. Some of these have been long-term. There is no doubt that without these devices we would have experienced a serious data loss issue at this point.
I cannot attest to the long-term impact of power conditioning but I can only guess that overtime the ROI has been positive in that regard as well.
Notifications have definitely saved our IT investment by alerting us when our backup generator did not kick on.

Alternatives Considered

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.

Support Rating

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.

Other Software Used

Schneider Electric Symmetra

Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

Schneider Electric Smart-UPs

Sunbird DCIM

Vertiv Liebert Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS)

Sunbird DCIM

Tripp Lite SmartPro

Nlyte Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)

Symmetra

Vertiv NetSure DC Power Systems

Belden Power Distribution & PDUs

Cisco RP Series Power Distribution Units

Eaton Powerware 9300 Series

Gamatronic Power + UPS

LocknCharge