The Joys of Reliable Electric Power...

...and the pain when you don't have it!  We're blessed in this country to have fairly reliable electric power, just about all the time.  Perimeter Church is located in a part of Atlanta that has a lot of growth, so occasional power blinks are fairly common.  We are very fortunate that our campus has an emergency generator to deal with any extended outages.  We still use UPSes to bridge the gap, but generally, they only have to supply power for a very few seconds.  So, with all that redundancy, things should be functional all the time, right?  Well, except when a UPS fails.

We've been using APC units for a long time and have been quite pleased.  A few years ago, a vendor had us consider Tripp-Lite and we ended up purchasing a moderate rack-mount unit to power some of our networking equipment.  Yesterday the Trip-Lite let us down.  We had a short power blink, and somehow that Tripp-Lite didn't bridge the gap.  Worse, when power came back, it stayed OFF.  Wouldn't you know it -- three of our distribution switches that serve about 100 of our staff went down, along with our Internet connection.  Fortunately, this all happened before 8AM and I was able to restore full service within less than 5 minutes, but what a pain. 

I'm not at all ready to conclude that Tripp-Lite UPSes are bad in general, but we've sure got one that I don't like, so it's going out and APC is coming back in.  Of course that means cycling power on all those units, one more time, so our staff will have to put up with a slightly more planned outage.

The Joys of IT life :-)