UPS: Meeting Your Power Requirements

A data center is critical to the functioning of an organization. Often it's
the power equipments that keep it steady and running.

Hence it is important that a solution provider (SP) offers the apt solution
to his customers when it comes to its power requirements. A solution that is
compact and less complex.

But often SPs are faced with a situation where the customer is cost conscious
and yet wants the best power management solution to meet their day to day
business requirements. Under such circumstances, the most viable solution is to
make the customer understand the implications of one time investment, given that
it is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) that actually matters in the end.

Delhi-based Godfrey Philips was one such client that was looking for a high
availability solution for its data center and office. It was evaluating several
UPS options that were available, so that its back up requirements were easily
met. However, its search ended when they met Anand Control. This APC partner saw
to it that it gave its client the best solution and that too within the
stipulated time period with the best TCO.

Client's instructions

Godfrey Philips had its sets of requirements and right at the beginning, it
had made it clear to the team from Anand Control that it was looking for a
redundant solution for its IT infrastructure. The customer had made it clear
that they had several expansion plans to be under­taken and hence needed a
solution that was easily scalable and flexible in terms of expansion.

“Due to the high availability requirement, the solution being offered needed
to be modular and hot swappable so as to reduce resolution time,” mentioned
Vikram Anand, CEO, Anand Control. In a nutshell, the client was seeking a
solution that would have eased their operations and was easy to maintain and
manage.

Designing the infrastructure

Since Godfrey Philips was looking for a solution that gave it the liberty to
scale it as and when the requirement cropped up, Anand Control had to ensure
that its offering was also manageable. It also had to provide them with a
redundant solution (a solution wherin one UPS is backed by another UPS). The
client was provided with a 50KVA UPS that was scalable up to 80KVA. Hence in the
future if the client wanted to increase the number of systems or expand its
infrastructure otherwise, it could do that without worrying about the load on
its power structure.

Godfrey Philips was also looking for an automatic shutdown of its database so
that data loss of any kind could be prevented. This was provided to it by
installing modular UPS, a solution that was also easily manageable.

But this does not mean that the entire solution rollout was smooth sailing.
Anand Control had its share of difficulties when it came to deploying the
project.

The first and foremost challenge that the SP's team faced was in convincing
the customer. Like any other company, Godfrey Philips was also concerned about
the cost factor for this deployment and keeping the same in mind, it asked Anand
Control to ensure the lowest cost possibilities while designing its power entire
infrastructure. The total cost of deployment keeping the various aspects in
mind, still amounted to approximately Rs 50 lakh.

In addition, the customer was not aware of the importance of Network Critical
Physical Infrastructure (NCPI). It did not know that the entire IT operation is
heavily dependent on an NCPI which can grow as per
the customer's needs. Thus commenced a round of meetings and presentations where
the management of Godfrey Philips was educated about the various aspects,
starting from technology to cost and infrastructure

“Once the initial solution was pitched in, it was a challenge to explain the
entire TCO and Return on Investment (RoI) to the customer. But we explained to
them the criticality of data loss and offered them the best solu­tion,” stated
Anand.

After long sessions and a couple of mee­tings, Anand Control succeeded in
their attempts to convince the customer. The client realized that though the
initial procurement cost was high, the overall cost was drastically low

on account of space saving, savings in main­tenance, man­agement and service and
conse­quently, the challen­ges were easily overcome.

Another cha­llenge that Anand Control faced was getting the site ready for
the installation. But the customer was again convinced for the same and hence it
did not take the team much time to go ahead and deploy the project which was
very less and much to the satisfaction of the customer.

There were two sales engineers involved in pre-sale discussion and solution
designing while a technical engineer was involved in designing the solution.
Following the sale, two more service and execution engineers were employed in
project which ranged from installation, completion, test run and handing over
the infrastructure to the customer.

Lessons learnt

It wasn't that APC was offering Godfrey Philips the most cost friendly
option; other brands were offering a more economical option. But when things
like battery, space constraint and cabling among others were taken into
consideration, the client was happier choosing APC over others. Post deployment
of the project, the company has not faced any downtime or shutdown problem.
Besides, the load has been evenly distributed and that has further eased their
infrastructure.

“We were looking for UPS for our data center and office and during the entire
process we evaluated several options. After much calculations and search we came
to the conclusion that APC was offering the best solution. Not only was the
solution flexible, but if needed, we could have easily added capacity to it as
when required,” mentioned SP Giridhar, DGM-IT, Godfrey Philips.

The biggest lesson that the team from Anand Control learnt was that it is
only when one provides an overall solution to the customer and makes him
understand the benefits of the same, that one can achieve success. “Transforming
the pre-sales presentation into tangible reality for the customer will always
result in a happy customer, who will always come back to us for any of his
simple or complicated IT infrastructure needs,” added Vikram.

Pooja Sharma

poojas@cybermedia.co.in