Schneider Electric Customers Tout the Reliability of its UPSs and PDUs

This audio was created using Microsoft Azure Speech Services

During the two days I spent in the Schneider Electric booth at the recent Interop 2014 event in Las Vegas, I got to chat with nearly 20 customers who use the company’s products, mostly uninterruptible power supplies and power distribution units. In those conversations, one word cropped up over and over again to describe the UPSs and PDUs: reliable.

Rick Prendergast, for example, is data center manager for Black Lotus, a security service provider with four data centers in the U.S. that use APC by Schneider Electric PDUs. That wasn’t always the case, however, as Prendergast says he’s used a variety of other brands over the years.

“The Schneider PDUs have proved to be more reliable, easier to use, easier to deploy,” he says. “It’s what we go with now, exclusively.”

Mahmaud Alquran, VP of IT at the financial services firm FFN, says his data center experiences two or three power outages per year. To protect some 20 servers and 20 to 30 switches, among other gear, he uses APC by Schneider Electric Symmetra UPSs.

“We are relying on them completely,” he says, noting the firm does not have backup generators but gets about 3 hours of run time out of its UPSs. That’s enough time to ride out some outages and to shut down servers gracefully if need be.

Chris Holland, Director of Information Technology at NewLife Industries Inc., a screen print and embroidery company in Somerset, Kent., uses APC by Schneider Electric Back UPS units in its call center as well as marketing and graphic design departments.

The company experiences frequent power outages, flickers and other power disturbances, he says. “We do rely heavily on the BackUPS units to sustain us through those,” he says. “I’ve gone through several backup vendors and APC seems to last the longest for us and be the most reliable.”

Alonzo Ramos, systems administrator for the IEEE Computer Society, likewise uses mainly APC by Schneider Electric UPSs at his facilities in New Jersey, California and D.C. The California data center where he works has seen its share of power outages but the UPSs give the company up to 90 minutes to either switch to generator backup or gracefully shut down its servers.

His first introduction to APC was when he was enlisted to help a couple of network engineers move a large, 400- to 600-pound APC UPS to a rack. “It took six of us to actually move it and put it on the rack,” he says. That was about 12 years ago – and he’s stuck with the company ever since.

Now, he says, “You say UPC, you think APC.” I’m reasonably sure he meant to say “UPS,” but we get the idea just the same. Such are the risks you take with live, on the spot video interviews.