Having high-performance technology can bring about higher risks. As with any major technological transformation, having computers become central to our lives and businesses has good and bad consequences. Obviously, our computer databases are now indispensible to managing and organizing both personal and business relationships. From personal art projects to family photos to billion dollar investments, no matter what kind of data you’re working with, the fact is that there’s some situations where losing it—or leaving it open to theft—is simply unacceptable. You count on your investments to be stable, but there’s a very real threat to stability in any electronic device — and that’s its power supply.
People tend to forget that electrical power is a tricky and temperamental thing, or that regardless of weather, accident, or human failure, it can be counted on to run their systems. We experience brutal winters in Canada, and we can never expect the weather to behave so our businesses keep functioning! It’s also easy to assume that computers are fairly resilient to sudden power failures—they’ll just shut off for a while, right? However, the reality is that a power failure can cost a company thousands to millions of dollars in damages in the blink of an eye. Cloud storage depends on servers, and these servers are often the most delicate when it comes to power interruptions. This is where a battery back—a UPS, or Uninterrupted Power Supply—comes into play.
When they first appeared, they were little more than glorified batteries. Decades later, and the UPSis a constant subject of technological innovation and absolutely necessary for commercial, governmental, and industrial organizations. Newermodels have ever-increasing power storage capability and long-lasting reliability. Once only useful in the short-term and for a handful of computers, they can now supply power to an entire town!
While municipal and industrial sectors absolutely rely on what a UPS as to offer, the most common use of these battery backups is within data centres—and data centre are often what powers cloud storage. This need for continual reliability in writing data (and for the advanced security encryptions that keep it safe) means that it’s imperative that they never suffer from the sudden shutdowns that come with power failures.They’re also often used in this context for multiple redundancies. This means that the UPS might be part of secondary fallback systems that ensure that even in the case of two points of failure, the data itself will always remain safe.
Our focus on data centres has also inspired a more recent area of technological innovation. The newest models of UPS are fully networked, which means that a person monitoring servers and running damage control during a storm can actually check on the status of a UPS system without ever needing to be near the models themselves. The fact that many of these are done with standard HTML5-based technologies also makes integration into existing monitoring software quite simple.
With today’s hands-free software, remote access, easy to change batteries, great warranties and insurance policies, and more power regulation, a UPS battery backup system is more powerful, versatile, affordable, and essential than ever before. Head to Toshiba.ca/Professional/Industrial/UPS/ to get a sense of how far the technology — and customer-friendly affordability — has come.