"we chose APC because of UPS management software compatibility with platform standards."
John Dwyer
Manager
Microsoft Information Technology Group
South Pacific Region
Microsoft is the juggernaut in the information technology industry. When the chance comes to do business with the Redmond, Wash. based company, in any part of the world, a company should match Microsoft's innovation and enthusiasm. Microsoft's South Pacific 70 server system is based in North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia. It is comprised of Compaq tower and rack servers and supports roughly 300 internal users in six locations throughout the continent, as well as 200 Microsoft vendors who can access the client server databases.
APC was the best solution to protect this vital information source according to John Dwyer, manager of the Information Technology Group in the South Pacific Region, and Liz Jones, a network analyst. Dwyer and Jones initially surfed the web to gather their power protection options. Both said they could have just used the Compaq UPSs that came with their servers but reconsidered that route.
"We don't necessarily think the single source solution works best, so we decided to 'build' our system ourselves using vendors that have specialized expertise in servers, hubs, routers and UPSs," Dwyer said.
Microsoft South Pacific has decided to to use various brands for various components, counting Compaq, Ungerman Bass, 3Com, Cisco and APC among its suppliers. Dwyer and Jones said they are moving to standardize with Cisco for their networking infrastructure and have made Compaq a server standard because these decisions compliment their "best of breed" strategy. Both commented that any single source solution they considered had not sufficiently "matured" yet. APC UPSs have become their power protection standard due to their scaleability and integration into the "total Microsoft solution."
The pair from Microsoft also considered other UPS vendors when making their initial decisions but decided that APC would be their best choice. They said the reasons behind their choice were that APC was a recognized name; it has local support; it is compatible with NT; it has a rack-mountable solution; it is already a "Microsoft Solution Provider member"; and Microsoft corporate uses APC products.
Dwyer said that a major point in APC's favor was the control and SNMP capabilities of the PowerChute plus software.
"As soon as I started PowerChute plus, I learned that we had other APC UPSs in our building," he said. "I like the control, management and pro-active monitoring of all our UPSs."
Dwyer and Jones currently count 15 APC UPSs in use at Microsoft South Pacific. Among these are 10 Smart-UPS 2200 RMs and 5 Matrix 5000s. APC units are also going to be located in the division’s five branch offices.
"UPS hardware should do what it's supposed to do: provide backup power flawlessly," Dwyer said. "UPSs may vary to some degree on diagnostics and warnings, but we chose APC because of UPS management software compatibility with platform standards."
Dwyer and Jones had noticed several problems with their old UPSs which prompted them to look into buying a new brand. They said another company that sold Microsoft two large 5 kVA units provided terrible service. There were heat problems and constant failures of their old UPSs. In fact, they said these older units actually caused power problems and system downtime. They also considered that using single, larger UPSs would not be scalable with their expanding system. Fortunately, Jones noted, they decided on APC.
"The North Ryde grid went down one day," she said. "All the rack servers protected by APC kept running for over an hour. We only expected to get 20 minutes backup runtime."
Jones said that Microsoft South Pacific had yet to configure PowerChute plus software at that time so the UPSs gave the IS team enough time to safely shut down all their servers.
"The potential risk is dramatic," Dwyer said. "For us, the risk of data corruption is far greater than the risk of downtime. We have records of 1 million customers and 3 million product registrations on file."
Dwyer and Jones gave their own recommendations for anyone considering the purchase of a UPS. They suggested APC rackmounted UPSs due to their ease of installation. APC's "distributed" or "scalable" power protection strategy allows users to expand in-step as they buy new servers, they said.
This allows users to separate important equipment and provide a more reliable solution. The alternative would be to overload a larger UPS. Dwyer said this is risky and that a user should not be too reliant on one UPS. He recommends protecting each application server with its own UPS. File and print servers can be clustered with the application server on a single UPS.
With all these attributes in mind, Dwyer and Jones are confident they made the right choice with APC.
"The long term implications are the cost and time associated with the recovery of lost data," Dwyer said. "A momentary outage for Microsoft could create a week's worth of work rebuilding files, transactions and customer databases."
08/06/2001
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