Smart-UPS is a data center power option from Schneider Electric, formerly from APC.
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Sunbird DCIM
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Sunbird Software headquartered in New Jersey offers their DCIM Suite of applications, available a la carte, as a total DCIM suite, in an asset and capacity oriented bundle or bundled for environmental and power consumption monitoring. The suite includes tools like Asset, Capacity, Change, Energy, Environment, Power, as well as BI & Analytics, to provide end-to-end administrative control over the data center.
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.
There are a few things that need work from flexibility within the asset process documentation. The interfacing with CMDB will be easier if the asset documentation had more flexibility in the standard fields. The product will support our need for a central depository of all assets, connections, and usage within our data centers, which at this time is managed by a spreadsheet with limited access. The ability to review and set goals of environmental and capacity has not been easy, with dcTrack this has become much easier than dealing with Excel tabs.
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.
Hard to say at this time what I will gain or the company will gain for the user but to understand all assets in a Data Center in a single location is a great tool for support and maintenance cost analysis.
To be able to see or understand the power needs of a given location provides the need of understanding cost impact under the different location cost models.
