Steve Spicer of Eaton explains: “It seems that not all IT Professionals realise there is much more to modern UPSs than providing power supply support. One respondent told us that they get an e-mail alert when their system goes onto battery power, at which point they have to intervene manually. They were quite surprised when we told them they didn’t need to and that their UPS can manage everything from automatic live migration of virtual machines during power disruptions to a graceful shutdown of computers, virtual machines and servers during an extended power outage”.
The poll, which was conducted by Eaton at Spiceworks’ recent SpiceWorld London user conference, also revealed that 85% of IT Professionals who responded had experienced a power outage within the last 12 months and of these, 33% had taken up to five hours to recover.
Eaton conducted the poll to find out more about its customers’ buying processes and at which point they consider the power management requirements, particularly in relation to virtualising an IT environment. The answers revealed however that the interpretation of what ‘power management’ covers varies from installing a UPS to provide emergency power, to using software that integrates with virtualisation platforms and automatically triggers the movement of virtual machines to unaffected devices or, when necessary, initiates a graceful shutdown of affected IT equipment during power outages.