Eaton UPS Reviews

It services two data centers and critical infrastructure computing devices.

In the wintertime, we're subject to a lot of pretty severe weather conditions. We have our UPS system with its battery backup, plus we also have a generator. When you're constantly going to get brownouts and all-out power failures, where the city generator and our building generator may have to kick on, in front of all that equipment is our data center with its networks, servers, routers, switches, firewalls, information security, and data. Every time there is a power hiccup, this puts that equipment at significant risk. Having the Eaton system in place really tempers that whole environment and disruptive nature of trying to provide clean power. It delivers to all that equipment good clean power to protect and provide the service. 

There can be some type of power disruption about once a month, 12 times a year. If we did not have the Eaton system in place, we may not lose everything. But every time there's a power hiccup, we might lose some piece of equipment that won't come up properly. At the very least, when those systems would go down, people will not be able to access services. Then, our technical folks will have to come in and try to get systems to come back up gracefully. The Eaton system minimizes the exposure and risk of all those power outages. Without the Eaton system, if you looked at the customer impact, it would be huge because we have 1,000 or more people accessing those services which would be at least temporarily offline until we got them back up and running. 

The online system monitoring is its most valuable feature. The feature set is understanding that if there are any issues, then we get notified instantly throughout the system. So, the system health check notification is really important to us.

For identifying issues, the vendor’s remote monitoring is excellent. That's one of the things that's really nice about this system is we are constantly getting health checks and health alerts. If anything happens, we immediately get notified. That's really good to know because it's such a critical piece of the infrastructure that you want to know when something's not quite right. You don't want to wait until there's a catastrophic failure and you've lost your data center. 

As far as future planning, it helps us in two ways:

1. We can monitor the usage thresholds. If we see that we need to consider expanding capacity for our capacity planning, then we can understand if we will need to do an upgrade.
2. If we see something that is constantly problematic, we may say, "Okay, it's not necessarily a piece of hardware failure, but there is a root cause here that we need to think about a different solution or expanding again back to that expanding point." It helps us make decisions should we see chronic issues coming up that need to be addressed with different hardware.

The remote monitoring makes our job easier. The UPS system is in an isolated room, so we would not know if there is a small issue without going in and physically laying eyes on it, since we never really see it. It just runs in there. We have temperature alarms, water alarms, system alarms, and system monitoring. From an ease of use, it's out of sight, out of mind, and we just get our updates. It also increases productivity since we don't have to spend time going in and manually checking the system and its health. That time can be spent doing other things. From a productivity standpoint, if you have to wait until the system is in a catastrophic failure, there would be a significant outage to the data center. This would then severely disrupt and hamper the productivity of the customers who are consuming the data center services.

One issue is we have a sort of U-shaped configuration. That does become a problem where you have hot and cold aisles. Therefore, you potentially could have hot air blowing out the back of one and into the intake of another system. That's always an issue. However, it's not an issue for us because we have all those batteries in a separate, safe environment. We don't need to have them in our data center.

The industry is going to a smaller footprint, but that does come at a cost, specifically for battery reserve time, size and density of the system, and BTU generation. Those three areas contribute to the heat generation factor. I think that they've done a really good job. But, when you look across our infrastructure, it's the UPS system that takes up the most space of any of our products. 

About 10 years.

It is very stable. It's what I would expect. We have had hardware issues, but they're not chronic. When there is a problem, it always gets resolved. It is a very stable system but it is also a sacrificial lamb. It's taking a lot of heat from commercial power and absorbing it. There are failures but they are absolutely on par with what you expect.

The solution’s ability to be upgraded online, without bringing our production environment down, is really good. I've been surprised. We have had several upgrade hardware replacements and have not had to take the system down. I would rate the redundancy very good that we have built-in for power modules and batteries. We have been able to do quite a few updates without taking our system offline. The built-in redundancy is very good and has helped us save from having to shut our systems down while we upgrade online.

When upgrading, we are able to increase the power capacity of the existing hardware. You can add up to 20 percent capacity instead of replacing the system. To be able to incrementally add capacity as you need it, this means that you don't have to buy more than you need. They give you incremental steps to add capacity where you need it. 

The scalability is good. One of the issues that you always run into with these systems is they have to be scalable because the last thing you want to do is buy all this infrastructure then need a little more capacity, because then you have to forklift out what you have and put in the new. That doesn't work. Therefore, scalability is really important and this system allows us to incrementally add capacity as needed.

We have utilized the building-block nature of the solution as we have grown. We can add modules, which helps from a cost standpoint and protects the initial capital investment in the system, rather than having to completely replace the system. We can start small scale and incrementally fund additional capacity as needed rather than purchasing a system, having to pull it out, and buying a brand new one.

We use Eaton extensively. We're using it for all of our critical infrastructures. From a sizing standpoint, we use it for four buildings and two data centers.

We have about five staff personnel and a portion of their responsibilities is to maintain these systems. They have three different roles in the company:

1. Data center managers who are responsible for the uptime and service delivery of all the equipment that is connected to the UPS. They monitor the health of the system on a day-to-day basis, hour by hour. They are watching that every day, monitoring the system. 
2. Building management: Part of their health check every day, they do a physical walk-through of all of the HVAC systems. In the case of the UPS systems, they go in and just open up the doors to make sure everything is looking right. Also, that stuff doesn't sound funny.  
3. We have electrical staff onboard and onsite. If there are electrical issues, they will come in and address those.

The onsite service's response time is very good for our location. If there are any issues, they instantly call, then we get a ticket in and have a technician on standby. As soon as the parts have arrived, they come onsite. They fix the issue 100 percent of the time on the first visit. We're able to do enough diagnostics beforehand so we have the right part. I don't think we've ever run into a situation where they've shown up and had to come back again. They come prepared, the folks are knowledgeable, and the work always gets done.

They really set the gold standard for support. I wish some of our other vendors operated like this well. There are other vendors who do very well, but Eaton's always on the top. I wouldn't even question using their product and having their support agreements in place. They are outstanding.

I would recommend the support contract because they really make good on that. You can choose to just go as needed, but when the system fails or there's a problem, you want to pick up the phone and be the number one priority. By having a maintenance contract, you will get an instant response.

Before Eaton, we used a number of different solutions, like Tripplite and APC.

The initial setup was straightforward from the standpoint that they did a great job coordinating and installing it. However, from the customer perspective, the initial setup was complex. It was just very straightforward and easy to work with the Eaton team.

Our deployment took about a week. We needed to:

1. Do capacity planning. 
2. Have an electrical infrastructure put in place. 
3. Have the environmentals, the safe room, for the batteries to be in the AC.
4. Schedule the outage.

There is a lot of detail with:

• Setting up.
• Configuring.
• Building.
• Testing the system.
• Migration to the new system.
• The operation of it.

In summary, we have to test the system, migrate to the new system, and then have day two support.

We had onsite installation from Eaton, who was excellent. I would give them 10 out of 10 for their commitment to service, customer contact, immediate responses, scheduling resources, and having knowledgeable people. They make sure everything is ready for the installation, during the installation, the updates, and through the follow-up. Eaton's support, pre-sales, sales, implementation, and post support are really good. The implementation was excellent and the day two support was good as well.

We needed to have an electrician onsite during the initial deployment.

When you're implementing it, make sure you:

1. Do your capacity planning. You want to buy the right system for the right need. You certainly don't want to have a system smaller than you need.
2. Have a good vendor who is knowledgeable in configuring, setting up, and implementing these systems.
3. Have a good electrical contractor who can make sure that all the power to the UPS system, then out of your UPS system to your data centers and whatever it's protecting, is clean and wired correctly. You want a good electrical contractor for this. 
4. Address your AC and cooling needs for where the system is placed.

We have seen return on investment with system uptime. 

We are avoiding network infrastructure hardware failures due to dirty power coming into the systems. We are buying insurance and assurance by keeping the system up. The assurance side is for uptime, then insurance is to avoid hardware capital system failures which require complete replacement of hardware.

We could have 12 incidents a year where they are disruptive (at the very least) with one a year being catastrophic. Those incidents are eliminated by having the Eaton system in place.

The solution saves us about 20 percent in rack space.

It is an expensive technology. The maintenance is expensive. The batteries are expensive. Replacing those batteries is expensive as a capital cost. You have to plan for it every four to five years, but it's the cost of doing business. The cost of not having a good reliable system in place is even higher when you have catastrophic failures. I would recommend the product, but you do have to be prepared to spend some money, both on the product as well as all the environmental preparations for powering the system and cooling system.

We use their service plan, which includes parts so we don't do the maintenance on it ourselves. We have a service plan that we use, then they do all the maintenance and periodical maintenance (PM) work. If there are any hardware failures, then they also do the work. Therefore, it's a hardware/software support contract that includes labor.

For our used case, 12kW is good. It has worked very well for us. They can be a lot bigger and they can be smaller, but the 12kW seems to be just about right for us. It has a good price point.

Eaton's power density is very competitive and very much right where they should be, especially compared with competitive, modular solutions.

You want to try and find a company who can provide support, is comfortable, and understands the product line. Product, familiarity with local contractors, and reputation of the product tends to be the driving force behind the different systems out there, because electrical contractors may have several options that they can go with.

You need to have electrical contractors who are familiar with a system. You could have a great system, but if you don't have a local provider who can help with the installation along with a good vendor, then you have a problem. On the other hand, you can have a marginal system, but if you have good support, then that works. Reputation, supportability, and reliability are the most important things.

The company is reliable and excellent to work with. I would recommend Eaton. If we have any other projects, it would not even be a question whether we would go with Eaton.

The solution’s footprint is very good, but the solution’s power density in relation to its footprint is satisfactory/acceptable. There is always a trade-off when you're trying to add more power to size. Then, there's the cost:

• If it's the batteries, and you're using typical gel cell types, those are larger. If you use a higher density battery type, the cost goes up. 
• With the transformers and electronics in it, if you try to make them really small, the cost is going to go way up. Smaller is always better, but you can only go so small with it. 

It's always given that you're going to need at least one or two racks dedicated to power. When everything else is shrinking in size, we can get so much data storage, computers, and networking equipment into such a small space. The UPS system remains probably a large part of our footprint. I wouldn't penalize the company for that. I would just say it's somewhat a reality of the technology with the transformers and batteries. Eaton is right there in the middle of any systems that we spec out or handle.

If there's a neutral setting in there, it's rack-mountable. I would say this feature is convenient.

I would rate this product a 10 (out of 10).

The units we have are for our data center. We have a data center that needs to be up 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The three Eaton units make up half of our two-end power structure.

It's pretty straightforward that these are battery backups. The job of these units is that if we have a power outage, they carry the full load of all of our IT equipment until the generator kicks in.

In our organization, we have not only IT equipment in the data center, but we also talk to equipment throughout the world. We are one of the largest research institutions in our field in the world. We have pieces of equipment all over the world that actually call and talk to equipment in our data center. If we have downtime, there is the potential to lose very expensive assets that are in the field. We really have to be able to trust in the products that we select for this environment. It's one thing if people can't work for a couple of hours. That's terrible and there's a huge monetary value attached to it. But it's another thing if you lose $10 million in equipment, gear, and assets.

Our data center has been up for as long as I've been in charge of it. We haven't had any downtime in eight years. That's the best. A lot of that is the the people that own these units. By way of analogy, a Toyota is very reliable as long as you take it for oil changes. You stop taking your car for oil changes, things are going to die. There's no perfect product out there, but if you stay with the manufacturer recommendations for stuff and the schedules for maintenance, they're going to last forever.

The solution's heat dissipation capabilities allow it to be located near equipment racks without concern about hotspots. It's a square-footage thing. If you can put them in row, then you don't have to build a separate room for stuff and that separate room can be used for a person, storage, anything. 

The most valuable feature is the redundancy built into them. They work. Especially in today's climate, if your data center goes down, a lot of people come knocking at your door because they can't be productive and can't do their jobs. The best endorsement that I can give these things is they've never gone down.

It's also very important that the solution is a three-phase UPS. Three-phase cuts down on power usage, which cuts down on our electrical bill, compared to a single-phase product.

The footprint is standard, the same thing as every other solution that we could have gotten. But the power density in relation to its footprint compares really well. I have an APC that has the same footprint that's 20kW less. The Eatons have the same footprint but more power.

Also, the solution's ability to be upgraded online without bringing down our production environment works. We've never had to go down. Then you have Eaton come out and upgrade the firmware on all the modules so that they're all even. It's a simple thing.

It's a plug-and-play machine. If you need to add another power module, you just put it in like you would put a tape into a VCR or a CD into a CD ROM. You just throw it in and it automatically discovers itself. It's easy. When upgrading, you are able to increase the power capacity of the existing hardware until you get to 60kW. They're 12kW modules, so there are five of them. You can increase them by 12kW at a time. It keeps your operations costs down until you need it.

We do not use Eaton's remote monitoring, we use StruxureWare. We do use all of Eaton's web interface cards and their SNMP polling, but it's actually going to a Schneider product. Eaton makes something similar, it just wasn't as intuitive.

We currently have three Blade UPS's. The newest one was purchased in 2018, and of the other two, one of them was bought in 2011 and the other one in 2010. So we've had them for a while.

The way they're built, they're a really resilient UPS. What happens is that these things are 60kW. There are five 12kW modules. You can lose one of the modules. Depending on your load and what kind of mode you have these in, you can lose up to two of them and things still keep cranking away. Now, what happens when you lose those tools is that you don't have your redundancy. But that's why we have other systems in place in the data center to carry that load. If you're designed right, these things work beautifully.

One of the more important aspects of these things is that they are scalable. Once you buy the pack, this thing is a 60kW UPS and they come in 12kW modules. You can start out with 12kW and get the whole installation done, and then it's just adding what you need in 12kW increments. So the cost to get into them is low and the scalability is there. The ability to expand 12kW modules is good.

Our original install was a full rack. The second one we installed was two modules. And then, about midlife, we maxed that one out with power. For the last one we did, we installed the full rack. But we're a nonprofit, so budgets can be a fluid thing from year to year. Something like this, where you can scale as needed, takes some of the burden off of people like us.

I think they're coming out with a lithium-ion battery option, which is going to decrease the heat load. For me, that's not going to be applicable to replace these things. I don't plan on replacing them for the next five to seven years.

My rule of thumb for all my UPS's is that I only load them to 50 percent because I want a redundant system to be able to handle that load. If I load one of them up to 80% and it fails, then another UPS has to make up for that 80 percent. If it's at 50 percent capacity, that puts it over. It's all in how you're running your data center.

Their field service team is phenomenal. I typically get one of three technicians. I've been working in our organization for 16 years and I've had the same three technicians for about the last eight years. I almost consider them friends, at this point. We've had a couple of issues where they've come out on a weekend. We have a four-hour response time, and they always beat it. If they can't make it in that four hours, I'll get a direct phone call from the tech to let me know where he is. But that's never been an issue getting somebody out there. All in all, it's been a good experience.

Typically, when you call in, they have already worked through to find the problem. All of these throw different error codes. They've almost always been able to fix it on the first call, the first site-arrival. They come with parts in hand if needed. There have been a couple of rare occasions where parts have had to be shipped, but even then, they're there within a day and things are back up.

We make use of both their service plan and their parts replacement plan. Once a year they come out and they do a preventative maintenance on them. At that time they upgrade the firmware and do an overall health check. Since we've owned these things, there's been no added expense, other than the service contracts. Service contracts are pricey, but it's better to have them because if you have one power module go, you've already doubled the cost of the service plan. We've had issues with them like that, but the equipment failure issues aren't a problem because the company is so responsive.

Before Eaton's products we had APC stuff. In terms of the reasons we switched:

• capacity for the footprint was one 
• price was absolutely another 
• the scalability.

Every UPS company makes similar products and it's just a matter of finding what products meet your needs. We needed a 60kW in a footprint that was three-phase, that was 208 volt. This fit the bill. It was the same thing with their 93PM offering. There are two companies that make a 200kW and 208 volt. One of them is Liebert and the other one is Eaton. The Eaton one is about 20 percent cheaper and does the same thing and it is still a reputable company.

I've gone through every phase of these, from designing for them, to installing them, to maintaining them and doing the typical preventive maintenance stuff.

The initial setup was very easy. It's all modular. Installing a UPS is installing a UPS. You bring wires into it, you bring wires out of it. With this thing, it's a rack. Everything's plug-and-play. It's very simple to put this thing together. It's nothing a consumer would ever do, though. You need licensed electricians to come in and do this. Eaton does the startup service, so even when it gets powered on for the first time, you have them come out. They run it through a series of checks to make sure everything is good. UPS's are very dangerous. One thing wired backwards turns it into a hydrogen bomb so you have to be very careful.

In terms of deployment time, everybody's situation is going to be different. We've had different iterations of installation. We had power running under the floor before, and now it's overhead.

There's always a deployment plan. You have to get all the players there: your electrician, etc. For us it was complicated because of where things are located in a building that was built in the 70s. Other people aren't going to have the same experience as we had. 

I'm the only person in our organization who is doing deployment and maintenance of this solution, for this application. I am the data center manager, and if one of them doesn't work, everybody knows.

I don't think you really get a return other than your uptime. We have APC products in there and part of the problem, why they didn't last, is because they weren't maintained properly.

We compared APC, Liebert, and Xtreme.

If it works for your application, go for it. It's a reliable product.

The rack-mountable part of this solution is not really applicable for these because ours is a full-cabinet installation. I've never used one in a standalone where you throw it in a rack with other equipment.

The solution’s power density is the right application for us but I can't say it's the right application for everybody. If you need a 60kW UPS, to me, this is the way to go because it's a really good product and the pricing is far more competitive than APC or Liebert, the other two big players. And Eaton's service is phenomenal.

In terms of the solution's heat dissipation reducing overall cooling costs, I can't say that for certain because I don't have metrics from another product to compare with. Everybody's data center is set up a little bit differently. We have what's called cold aisle containment, so it's very efficient at getting cold air to the front of the machines that need it and discharging them in the back and circulating it back into the cold air. I can say that our cold air containment has saved us money.

I can't say these things save rack space because, when you're in this type of environment, everything takes up the same amount of floor space. This is not a modular thing. The three of them that I have are six feet tall by 28 inches wide by 42 inches deep.

We also have other solutions from Eaton. We have a 200kW UPS, it's a 93PM, and we have PDUs. We have a mismatch of PDUs because of stuff being deployed at different times but they're still working. It would be expensive to replace them all and the monitoring stuff I have is not vendor-agnostic. They're all good products.

I'm not going to say it's a perfect product, but it's pretty close to a perfect product. We haven't experienced issues that can't be easily fixed. We're very happy with what we have now.

We have unstable power in our area and we have a medical device called a Linear Accelerator that we use to deliver radiation to patients. The unstable power was disrupting our operations and the UPS has helped us out with that.

The most important aspect is the fact that it protects the power to the Linear Accelerator. It also cleans the power a little bit and, as a result, I believe our equipment has become more reliable. 

It has been working and has allowed us to have more uptime.

The battery life seems to be pretty good. I don't have a lot of experience with other units of its size, but it does a good job of keeping our unit up. There is no active power management. It just keeps the power up. We haven't had any power failures that are long enough to completely drain the battery. It's been good for small power failures.

In addition, I can access the built-in webpage on the UPS and use that to look at the status.

It's on all the time and monitoring. It gives us an email once a month telling us that our device is working properly. It will also list the power events that happened in that month.

I think the batteries are based on lead-acid technology so they have to be replaced every five years, but with the new lithium-ion battery technology that is available, it might be good if, at some point, they updated their battery technology.

We have been using Eaton PredictPulse for one year.

It seems to be pretty stable.

The technical support is pretty good. In general, I've been able to get somebody on the phone. There was one time that I wrote an email that didn't get a response. Overall, it has been okay. It's not five-star service, but I've generally been able to get somebody on the line.

Neutral

It was installed in a day, but it took a while for it to be delivered. We had to hire somebody to bring it into the room where it was going to be installed, and then we had to bring in electricians. The setup itself was relatively straightforward. The hands-on time was pretty quick, but in terms of logistics, it took several weeks. At the end, somebody came from Eaton to turn it on.

We bought it indirectly through Elekta, which is the manufacturer of our Linear Accelerator, so the buying process was reasonable. Elekta purchased it for us. We paid Elekta and Elekta paid Eaton.

Elekta did the project management. The implementation was a little bit rough. We didn't fully understand what was needed, but that wasn't Eaton's fault.

We don't do anything to maintain it. It's pretty self-sufficient. The initial deployment required two people on our side, but that was just for one day.

It's not like we have any additional revenue as a result of using the UPS but it does improve our reliability. There is a positive impact in terms of patient care, although it doesn't necessarily translate into additional dollars. We were having issues with our Linear Accelerator that have been stabilized. More uptime means we're providing better patient care.

Elekta recommended this UPS and they set it up. We didn't really shop around because this was their solution.

It's a good device.

Eaton UPSs are primarily used in corporate data centers. It's the UPS before the generator starts.

We like the easy-to-read display screen and the web configuration where you can manage the unit.

The technology is reliable.

We haven't had any issues with it. We've been very happy with the units.

They could enhance their software, but overall, it's a good solution.

We have several versions of Eaton UPS deployed.

Eaton UPS is a stable product.

It is scalable. You can purchase units with a larger battery supply, which will give you more downtime. You can coordinate that and figure out how much battery time you need based on your risk level and the configuration of your generators.

The technical support is excellent.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward.

It is deployed and the units are maintained by an Eaton Professional, 

On our end, there is very little interaction from the end-user.

I don't have anything negative to say about this solution. 

In the time that we have had it, it has been an excellent product that's very reliable. We haven't had any problems with it. 

The support is really good. They offer quarterly support calls, which are very helpful.

It only does one thing, it gives you the power and all the information you need. There are not many features on there. It includes a power management feature. 

I don't see any features that will help me more than what is already there.

I would rate Eaton UPS a seven out of ten.

We use Eaton UPS's in a variety of our data centers and for emergency operations in our city.

What we were looking for wasn't necessarily to address challenges we were facing but for something that would reliably supply backup power to us, when needed, at an affordable price.

We have one big UPS at each of our locations. The 9PX is at our Public Works, while at the Police Department we have a 9170, which is a large three-phase UPS. At City Hall we have another large UPS. At each location we have a solution that will give us runtime during a total power outage, of anywhere from 30 minutes to six hours.

For the desktops and remote switches, we have a lot of the 1000s and 1500s. 

There isn't any one particular feature that is most valuable. The fact that they're reliable and that they notify us whenever the line power drops are the only things we really need. All of our UPS's have been available and up whenever power outages have happened.

So far, the battery life, from my observation, seems better than average. It was one of the features that Eaton had described to us. They have a certain way of charging the batteries and keeping them charged so that they actually last longer.

The Eaton products themselves, and the sales and support, are excellent. However, when it comes to the power management software portion, that's the part that I haven't really seen or heard a lot about. The dashboards of the UPS's, or the management software, are one area that they could probably improve a little.

We have been using Eaton UPS's for close to five years. It was five years ago when we first got connected with Jim Nimi who introduced us to them. We tried out a couple of them before we switched one of our older UPS's out to the large Eaton 9PX.

So far, when it comes to performance and reliability, we've had virtually zero problems with the products. From our perspective, they've just been up and running and we haven't heard from them. They've supplied us with power when needed. So it's a win-win for us.

It grows with our needs. Almost all of the systems that we looked at had pretty robust scalability, and Eaton's sales staff were always very forward-thinking when recommending the replacement units.

We plan to increase usage of Eaton UPS's. We have two more large batteries that need to be replaced in the city. We will be working on one of them this fall, and the other in the spring.

I've only had to call their support twice and they have been excellent. They routed me to the correct person right away and they took care of my issues.

We had some aging units throughout the city. Some of them were 15-plus years old, and it was a matter of starting to replace them one at a time. About 80 percent of our units are now from Eaton. We've slowly converted almost the entire city to Eaton.

The purchasing experience and delivery were all excellent. They were very straightforward and easy to do. The actual installation was a little more complex.

The installation was a little bit different from the purchasing and delivery stages, only because I hadn't ever really been involved in replacing a UPS before. It seemed more cumbersome than I thought it would be. However, I didn't really have anything to compare it to. The difficulty seemed to come from having to hire a contractor to do the electrical work and prep, and then have him plug it in and set it up. Then, a person from Eaton had to actually come out and turn it on. That was the unusual part for me. I would have assumed that an Eaton person would have installed it and plugged it in. I'm not sure that reflects badly on Eaton. It's just the way things are done, but it was new to me.

In terms of our staff involved with the units, two technical services managers were the main ones who worked with Eaton, when spec'ing out the batteries.

I'm not so sure about a return on our investment. We got an affordable, decent price and we've gotten a good product out of it. But UPS's just sit there until they're needed. When line power has gone out, they've been there every time for us.

Before we chose Eaton, we evaluated other vendors, but we try to standardize. For us, it doesn't make sense to have two or three UPS vendors. Before we started replacing the old ones, we looked at APC and a couple of the other UPS vendors, along with Eaton. We thought that, for the overall product, Eaton supplied the best and we standardized on them.

Look at the price and availability, as well as the long-term durability of the batteries on the Eaton side. That's what they did for us.

Eaton has a lot of reputable years in the data center industry, giving out UPSs to massive data centers. We really rely on these units to ensure that we have no power interruptions. They have a proven track record. Personally, I use them because we have experienced a lot of close calls, where Eaton UPSs saved my infrastructure from any type of downtime.

We have a monitoring software that I am not very familiar with, which just landed on my lap recently. All the global offices for our corporate data center (300-plus locations), a lot of these closets have PDUs in them. I do know some of them are Eaton products, but the majority of them are different. 

In my world, we use a little bit of everything. We have our PD UPSs, which are our uninterrupted power supply units. We have the UPS internally to the data center as well as PDUs, so we have UPSes in a lot of our server cabinets.

We have our bigger unit, a 300kVA unit, which is a lot bigger and not a rack-mountable unit. These are standalone frames. If we went into a smaller UPS design, I would consider having a rack-mountable UPS. However, the way certain of my data centers are designed, it has made more sense to have a frame UPS in place, as opposed to a rack-mountable UPS.

Considering the drastic changes our data center has taken in the past five years, Eaton has been able to accommodate a lot of our needs, e.g., remote monitoring.

My team knows how to respond to the actual monitors. If they get an alert, and it is a critical one, they automatically place a call in immediately with our vendor. Obviously, they notify us. 

I believe that every industry today should put a remote monitoring solution in place. You need to have a business continuity backup plan, as opposed to having onsite people. I believe remote monitoring is going to be the way of the future for a lot of data centers.

The redundancy aspect is the most valuable feature. Within the UPS itself, Eaton UPS has different critical layers of redundancy, e.g., everything from battery banks down to controllers inside a UPS. It also has a default mechanism of an internal bypass in case something goes wrong with the actual UPS itself. The way I like to describe it the best is business continuity.

The solution’s footprint is excellent. It is the reason why I keep on choosing Eaton. It has great products and solutions. Eaton prepares us for the future state of our data centers. They come out with impressive, new technologies that we rely on to make sure that there are no blips in all our data center infrastructure. So, we have a clean source of energy into all our internal systems.

I use the internal legacy monitoring that we currently have set up on all our UPSs. We found the internal remote monitoring is very effective. We do have internal teams at our corporate data centers, which are staffed 24/7, who look at these monitors.

The external monitoring solution could use further enhancements. I'm thinking of business continuity. If an internal legacy monitoring solution goes down, and it has no one to connect to the outside world, then it can't send out an alert. How are we going to be able to determine that there is a problem with that UPS if it loses network connectivity?

Cellular hotspots will be a big topic in the coming years. 

I have been using Eaton UPSs as long as I have been in my career: 23 years.

Our Eaton UPSs help with business continuity. I have a reliable system in place that I know that I can trust.

I use the vendor service plan. The reason why I go this route: They built the systems, thus they are very familiar with the systems. I am in an industry where I cannot have margin for error. I would much rather pick the vendor who made and knows the product like the palm of their hands. 

We have had onsite service. Eaton services all our current UPSs. For some of my UPSs, they do hire qualified third-party vendors, but Eaton does maintain them. Their response time has been phenomenal. I did have a couple of very close calls. Their engineers were onsite immediately. They actually beat the required SLA that we had signed in the contract for remediating any type of issue that we have had. I have been very impressed with Eaton's response time.

On the first visit, they assess. A lot of times, parts need to be ordered. It can take X amount of time for parts to arrive onsite, depending on the type of issue. I have had different issues over the years. For the most part, all my problems have been minor. For the big problems that I've had, they remediated those within a two-day period. During that time frame, I had no outages due to the UPSs that I had in place.

We did a UPS replacement, putting a newer UPS in a production data center. We did this without an outage, which we take a lot of pride in.

UPSs replacements are actually very complex. There is a lot of planning involved. It took almost six months to get it right.

There was a lot of planning involved for our implementation strategy. When you are replacing a single UPS unit, which is the heart of your production data centers, you have to make sure it is planned right. You have to make sure that it is on the money. There were a lot of high blood pressures during that period of time.

I was a part of our initial setup. I was in the design factor of this.

While you are planning this, your number one thing is to minimize any type of risk that will happen during this whole upgrade transition. Remember, you are ripping out an old UPS with the new UPS, so downtime is critical during this period of time. I am a director for our global enterprise so I need to have a game plan ready and in place. Because if something goes south during this period of time, we have to make sure that we declare an emergency status to rebuild all our systems up from scratch. If that is not enough stress, I don't know what else is.

I needed to have my electricians involved in order to make this project successful. When you have a live UPS, and you're in a transition of upgrading them, you need to surround yourself with multiple team members to make that project successful, one of them is your electrician.

The UPS that we currently have in one of our production data centers has reduced our cooling costs by at least 30%. This is because of the way that the air vent flows are actually located in the internal plan.

I have mixed feelings about the pricing and licensing. I believe that when you sell a UPS, and considering the UPS is a lifeline to a lot of the major corporations, the monitoring solution should be part of the package automatically, out-the-door. If you have to raise that price on the UPS an extra $5,000, then do so at that moment. Don't have that as an extra offer after the UPS has been sold. I believe that all UPSs need to have high availability, all the latest software installed, and be ready to go out-the-door.

The power density will always vary depending on the models that you choose. We always like to have a 50% ratio density. We always look at a future for growth. Most of our UPSs were designed with future capacity and growth in mind.

Even the modular solutions out there today, compared to UPSs, they can be predesigned or prefabricated to feed one's needs. For example, in my data center I have X amount of kilowatts. You measure the right size UPS to put in place to ensure that it is picking up the load wherever it is designed to be at. Modular solutions do the same thing, just a little differently, but they still have the same capacity in line as the UPSs.

The solution's heat dissipation capabilities allow it to be located near equipment racks. As we know today, network monitoring is not 100%. You can have an internal failure on one of your switches where you lose monitoring to a UPS. Then, it will not send out alerts and nobody will know there is a problem with it. These modular cellular devices, or even hotspots, are critical to monitoring solutions because that is an extra layer of protection where it will still send out an alert, regardless if you had an internal network hardware malfunction.

I rely on Eaton for any future enhancements or software upgrades. 

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10). In my world, there is always room for improvement.

We have distribution centers. Our newer distribution centers have regular UPS's in them from Liebert. But we have two distribution centers that are older and we keep a small amount of network gear and server gear at those locations, two racks' worth usually. We use the Eaton UPS to support those racks. We can't have our power going down just because of a blip. 

They mostly support our Cisco, HP, and Dell gear. We have one UPS in one rack and one UPS in the other rack. They're set up to always be redundant.

The alternative was to put in a large UPS at a couple of locations, which we didn't have room for. So the Eaton solution made my life a lot nicer. I have found something that I can rely on, and I know the installation is easy.

We have not seen any hot spots. We monitor all locations through Environet and we have not seen any issues with these causing hotspots or in-rack heat. That was a concern with the first install we did, because we basically had to install it in a closet. Once we got through that one, and it was okay, we never thought about it again.

It has also saved us a fair amount of rack space.

The most valuable feature is that they work. They've been really reliable for us. They come as advertised. There is also a nice network feature that allows us to monitor them.

It's also very important that it's a rack-mountable, three-phase UPS. Some of the equipment we run requires a three-phase, such as HPE BladeSystems and some of the Cisco core devices.

I like the footprint because it's 12U and then you put the other module into it, so it's about 15U. That's so much better than what we were looking at before. We were looking at almost a full rack of UPS's. The power density in relation to its footprint is fine. I looked at things that were a little larger, and they took up a whole rack. I looked at things that were smaller but they wouldn't have supported our needs because we needed 12 kVA. It's a nice footprint.

We also have their remote monitoring installed. It's very easy to use.

If they could reduce the footprint even more, that would be great. And they could always make heat dissipation better. But as long as they're reliable and they work, I don't think there is much room for improvement for them.

We put our first one in two years ago.

No, issues at all. Lots of reliability. They're used heavily every day.

I have not had to scale them yet. It looks like it's pretty easy. It's just another module at your plugs. I haven't utilized the building-block nature of the solution yet.

Its ability to be upgraded online without bringing your production environment down would be great if I had to use that feature, but I have not. Any time I can do anything online, that's the better way of doing it.

In terms of upgrading, we don't have a set plan right now. I'm not saying we won't, but right now there's no plan.

Their install techs and the standard support are great to work with. They came and got the job done. We had a building in Atlanta where they were putting one in and there was a part that got lost because we weren't there to receive the equipment; it was the construction people who did. Eaton support was able to go out, get the part, come back, and get it working. Same day. No charge.

I have rave reviews for their techs. I don't have a lot to compare against, but from my experience with them, I would buy from Eaton again if ever needed to.

We have their parts replacement plan but we don't do the service plan. T&M is our company policy. We haven't needed any onsite service because we haven't had any issues at all.

Prior to having Eaton's BladeUPS in the five locations we have them, one location did not have a UPS, three were new construction, and the fifth one had a UPS, but it was a single-phase and it was about 20 years old.

At that last location I chose Eaton because I'd used it before. The first location I did with Eaton was a distribution center. Before Eaton, every time that center lost power — and it was right at the end of the grid, so it lost power a lot — the network would go dead and we'd have to recover the network and everything else. That's when we decided to put the UPS in. That's when I did the little evaluation I did. I worked with CDW for that. In fact, I've bought all of them through CDW.

I had to get a circuit running to me, but other than that I didn't have to have an electrician. That saved some money. In our distribution centers we have electricians, so that wouldn't cost me in those locations, but at the construction sites that I put it in, it would have.

The deployment, overall, is very straightforward. You just follow the cookie-cutter book that they give you to install the rack. Then their tech comes and, within a couple of hours, it's up and running. It easily takes less than a day.

We don't require any staff for maintenance. With my large UPS, I have a once-a-quarter maintenance program from the vendor, but this requires none. Three people in our organization interact with the Eaton UPS but that's a minor part of their jobs.

There was one tech from Eaton involved in the installation, and from our organization there was me and another person. We actually did the install and then they came in, connected it up, and did the confirmation on it.

At that one location where the power kept going down we have seen ROI by far. We couldn't keep having outages of 10 to 15 minutes. The UPS does what it does. It keeps the power up until our generator takes over.

The pricing was very fair. That was one of the criteria when we did our evaluation and Eaton had the better price at that time. And what's amazing about it is that I found no other costs with Eaton. It was the cost of the UPS and the cost of the parts contract and that was it. They have not ever charged me anything else.

I did a comparison when I did the first Eaton and they were by far, not just on footprint, but overall, the better product.

The greatest thing about them is how easy they go in and start working.

My advice would be to follow the installation manual. It's not a hard install, but it's a little tricky. It's a heavy unit, so you have to make sure you have enough people to move it into the rack and get the platforms in the rack correctly. Other than that, just let it do its job.

Our primary use case is mission-critical: data centers, communication closets, building automation systems, our utility plants. All our critical systems are run on Eaton.

Our organization has over 20 three-phase units. We've got the 9395s and a 9355s, the 480V three-phase and the 120V three-phase.  Looking forward to leveraging 93PM and the next generation of products

Their UPSs do their job. The argument goes that you find out that UPSs fail when you need them. Knowing these units are going to work allows me to sleep at night. I have a proven track record with them. They just always work. I've never had a problem, not power glitches, nothing. That is exactly what they're supposed to do. 

The two things that I like are the ESS, its related components, and the bypass sync, which means if there's a problem with the UPS I can mechanically wrap around it without going to static bypass. Eaton has one of the few units on the market that will do that.

Because we're running mission-critical loads, in the event I have a failure of the UPS where I can't go to static bypass before I go to maintenance bypass, I'm screwed. I risk losing the entire load. The Eatons allow me to go to maintenance bypass, which means paralleling on an alternate power source, and then take the UPS out without static. So if I have a failure, there is a minimal risk of losing a data center to repair the UPS - and that has saved me at least once. I had an alternate vendor where I wound up spending about $180,000 in mitigation - we had to provide temporary power, staffing, and a great deal of time coupled with risk because the UPS had a fault and I couldn't go to bypass. 

The alternate vendor's K13 contactor failure meant I could not go to static bypass safely. There was a 50/50 chance a unit would drop the load. On my Eaton, we had a component failure where it was unclear what the unit was doing. It was still maintaining load. I don't remember specifically what the part was, but it was one of the control systems. We were concerned that going to static bypass would have been problematic and Eaton Field Engineer said, "But it's not an issue, you can go to maintenance bypass and then we can fix it."

We learned the issue was resolved with a firmware upgrade It was never an issue. Though concerned if I moved the UPS to static bypass it would drop the load. Because of the way the Eatons work, I simply could have gone to maintenance bypass and never have had an issue. That means I would have had a mission-critical room that I don't lose.

One of the other key features that I like is ESS (Energy Saver System) for it's cost avoidance. What it allows the unit to do is run on utility power. The UPS units are smart enough and fast enough that 99 percent of the time, if utility power is clean, the UPSs operate on utility power allowing the batteries to rest.  Because the batteries are resting more than being drained in double conversion, we have seen battery strings operate 8+ years without issue.  Normally UPS batteries are replaced every three to four years. I can now get six to eight years out of the batteries providing for a large cost avoidance. When you're looking at a million-dollar battery replacement, to be able to push that out three years is an enormous saving. That's on the VRLAs.  With Lithium-Ion advances and cost reductions we are looking at a large paradigm shift to this model. 

The reason I stay with Eaton is consistency and reliability, and also the service organization. To me, Eaton provides some of the best service. I use the manufacture for my big iron. I do not use third-party maintenance for Critical Load situations. One, Eaton's been very competitive for me. There have really been no cost savings utilizing a third-party.  An advantage of using the manufacturer for service is direct access to engineers. If there is an issue, and everyone will have an issue at sometime, the field techs call the Eaton engineers. By leveraging the manufacturer access to parts is a given!  If there is an issue I don't want to wait for people to show up or argue the issue.  

VMMS is a good feature. There are multiple charging units inside each UPS. For example, on my 9395 I have three to four charging units.  The units are at full capacity the charging units will rotate on and offer similar to a lead/lag model.  This saves energy as well stages to meet capacity.   

Most of my units are large, 480v, three-phase units.  The industry is working to reduce footprint which is valuable.   Units are getting more dense and feature rich.  Advances in transformerless and Lithium-Ion are game changes.

The biggest improvement I would like to see is the remote monitoring and management. All the interfaces should match. The unit touch screen, Web interface, and other remote options should provide the same information and it can never be enough!  Presently the touch screens and web based interfaces look and function differently.  I want to know what this unit is doing. I want to be able to track and trend the data. .

The only other features I would like to see are technology improvements, which they're doing anyway. At what point do you go to transformerless? At what point do you have better caps? 

UPS operate in a simple matter.  improvements in software, contactors, coupled with transformerless and Lithium-Ion are disruptive technologies.  All the vendors are doing it and making it available. From an improvement perspective, they're on the right path. There isn't anything major that I can jump up and say, "I wish you would do this better."

On the single-phase units, I'd like to see ESS and Lithium-Ion through the produce line down to the 50k units.  These are coming!

I've been using Eaton UPSs going on 14 years.

It's rock-solid.

The units I have are scalable, to a point.  When putting in large units you spec for what the target capacity is.  In the end one may delay some charging modules but all the core infrastructure, cable, footprint, etc, must be in place day one.  If I'm buying one of these big 9395 units, I'm buying half-a-megawatt plus.  Eaton makes a lot of scalable units. They make the 93PM and the 9395 now has some great options for scalability.

The problem with scalability is, while they all do it, you're going to pay for it. If I'm going to go into an environment where I don't know what my load is going to, I don't want to buy two-and-a-half meg on day-one because I don't need it. But you've got to build everything for that on day-one: all the cables, the battery plans, the breakers; the frame has to be there.

If you're willing to spend that, then great. Most of the time, even in today's environments, it's the little ones that are scalable. You can start out with 25 Kw and go to 150. But if I want to start out at half-a-meg, and I'm going to scale to two meg, that's a different animal. I can do that with both of them. If I'm willing to pay for it, they have options. 

Do I think Eaton has scalable products? Yes, I do. And they met the needs that I have had in the past. Do I see value in scalability? I have yet to realize in my environments.

The Service Plan doesn't result in faster repair time because my repair times are so fast anyway. I've got four-hour response times on my units. If I have a problem with the unit, I get somebody here, 24/7, within four hours. 

One of the beauties of their sales team is they build relationships, so I'm not always calling an 800-number saying, "Hey, I need help," where the reply is, "Okay, where are you? What time zone are you in?" I can call my technicians 24/7 and say, "I have a problem" and they are on the way!  Granted there is little concern as I am under contract. Eaton's service team in the Chicago Metro area is a very personable team, all the way up to the VP of Service. They're focused on customer service and it shows in the relationships I've had with them.

The last issue we had a technician come down for was a battery issue. Sadly the issue was me not interpreting the alarm appropriately which simply had to be cleared. They came out and took the time to teach me.

Another time I got a UPS wet and blew it. That was exciting. We had a leak. It actually leaked through a 12-inch concrete slab above it. It was like a Rube Goldberg puzzle. We had a leak upstairs that traveled 20 feet across the concrete floor, found a crack, slid through the crack in the floor, into a conduit that's been in the concrete for a hundred years, down the concrete and then out of an abandoned electrical box in the concrete ceiling. It dripped on a piece of Unistrut, slid over about three feet, and dropped on a high-voltage energy bus. You can't make these things up.

The UPS did what it was supposed to do but we got it wet. The UPS went from ESS to double conversion, to bypass, back to double conversion, back to ESS, in 72 milliseconds. The way a UPSs works is if there's a large in-rush, which means a whole bunch of equipment needs a lot of power at once, the UPSs actually lets the utility handle it.  In an in-rush, my load will peak up, my draw will peak up. The UPSs will watch the inrush and grab the load when the demand stabilizes.  Under normal circumstance all would have been good.  Lesson of the day, keep equipment dry! 

I've have some GE & APC units and I'll tell you the same thing I've told every one of those vendors: When dealing with a product at this caliber, I can't go wrong with any of them. If I buy a Mitsubishi unit or a Liebert unit, they're all good units, bar none. Each vendor will debate why theirs is better bet in the end all will do the job.  The key is what is the right product at the time I'm going to buy which meets my needs. Who's got the best feature set, the richest feature set, the best price, and the best capabilities. What is the best return on my money at the end of the day.

Once that's said, it really comes down to the service organization and the reliability of the units. I have had issues with all the products and I am sure everyone out there has as well.  It's just I have had fewer issues with my Eatons than they have had with their other vendors.

I also believe in standards. Once I've picked a product line, my first choice for the next unit would be Eaton.  There are economies of scale having so many of them.

It comes down to this: When Eaton comes out to service units, they spend two-three days, and can cover them all. I'm not having to multiple vendors and schedule visits which consume my time.  I have one throat to choke, one contract, and one great relationship.  As a corporation, they still have the flexibility to be able to deal with the customer in that manner. Today, their service and customer relationships are their biggest value, absolutely, compared to the competitors I deal with.

The Eaton service organization is one of their strongest points.

I'm not an engineer or an electrician. For me, the ease/complexity of the setup is a hard question to answer because the field people do it. My observations are based on watching my electricians install my units and watching and working with the field engineers through the startup. It seems relatively straightforward. Plug component A into component B, run a wire from this terminal to that terminal. It seems very straightforward.

When the field techs have to do startups, it takes time to work through the details.  This is all scheduled!  When you're putting one, two, or two-and-a-half megawatts of UPS, there's an enormous amount of potential energy and danger. If they want to take a day or two to put these things in, I'm not going to argue with them, because I want it done right.

The installation depends on how fast you can put a 1000's of pounds of equipment.  You've just got to put big, heavy things in place and run big thick, heavy wires. You're running two dozen wires that are as big as your thumb and they're heavy; the wire is two-and-a-half pounds a foot. It's a lot of man-handling but I would say it's been relatively straightforward.

Is Eaton any better or different than any other UPS vendors on the market?  From providing backup power not really.  From how they do it, I can only say they have treated me well!

ROI is an extremely hard number to quantify. If a data center goes offline, the teaching and learning process at the University, and all the financial systems, hiccup. It would inconvenience an enormous amount of people. Some people would not teach because they can't get to electronic data. The cost of how many people would really go idle is difficult to calculate. 

Where the recovery comes in, with the amount of people involved, the numbers could get into the $70,000 s to $100,000 an hour number simply having faculty and staff idle people. It starts to add up.

In a previous position we calculated downtime at about $60,000 an hour, depending on the plant. Just idling staff cost that much. In higher-ed, what's more critical to the impact than idling people is the data. I have to protect the data. There are people whose life's work is literally sitting on a computers in one of my data centers. A faculty member who spent his entire life researching a subject may have his data sits on a computer in my data center. If that computer has a problem, he literally can lose his life's work. Granted backups should be in place and normally are. 

When you bid these large units I fin them all within a single-digit percentage point of each other. I can't make a bad decision. It's just what's the right decision at that moment in time? They're all cost-competitive.

I do pay for a service contract to Eaton every year. I do it through a third-party, but it's all Eaton paper. We do that because of the Ts and Cs - getting contracts mutually agreed to with all the legal teams is challenging thus I leverage a third party to help with this.  I have the luxury of dealing with Eaton direct or leverage my VAR as needed.  Either way communications between all parties is strong!

If you're thinking of implementing Eaton, reach out to their customers and then go talk to them. I make myself available to Eaton, nationwide. If they want to see my systems, I'll talk to them. I tell them good and bad. Eaton's not perfect. We've had a couple of bumps in the road, but we worked together and we've solved them, in a very positive.

You're going to have problems. The key is you judge character: how do you respond in a crisis. When I went out to bid recently, I even told Eaton: "It's pretty hard to negotiate when I'm telling all my bidders they have to come to you for my big-iron contracts." Eaton could have taken advantage of the situation but did not!  They continue to be competitive. 

The biggest lesson I've learned from using these UPSs is that you get what you pay for. The one-sentence summary of the value of the Eaton is that I sleep well at night.

Eaton's lithium-ion batteries were not a factor in our decision to go with their UPSs. All the manufacturers are buying the same batteries and cabinets.

PredictPulse, in my opinion, is valuable. But I also feel it's overpriced at this time.  We monitor, track and trend our units 24x7. If there's an alarm, I get a text and an email and somebody is responding to it. Where PredictPulse is valuable is that it's looking across 10,000+ units and says, "Hey, you know what? We're seeing this component failure," or "Based on this information, we think you should probably fix your caps or change your fans." Or, "We've got a firmware update and we've seen problems. We're putting a fix on our firmware. Next time we're out we'll put this in." That's where it's valuable. 

I do like where PredictPulse notifies Eaton Service team if there is an alarm.  Having Eaton see the alarm in near real time brings peace of mind.  I continue to evaluate PredictPulse.  My guess as more customers utilize the price will come down.  

The touch screen functionality is fine but to me it's overrated. I don't know why they have it. Well, I do know why they have it because they need to "keep up with the Jones's." It's fine. It does what I want it to do. It tells me all the information.  From a practicality perspective, it serves one function: It's a showpiece. Most of us don't touch the panels.  I want to monitor remotely and that is a complaint I have.  The remote monitoring software does not provide the same information that the touch screen provides and neither provide me the same information that the field techs can draw out of the unit when they directly connect to them.

I use Eaton transformers but I don't use their in-cabinet power strips for one reason. Not because they don't make a good product, but because I use an alternate vendor.  The vendor I use fully assemble the cabinet with a number of components and the PDU's at the factor.    The cabinet shows up, I roll it off a pallet, and I'm done.

I do have some Eaton PDUs, but I don't have a lot of them. Most of my big breakers are all Eaton. My big step-down transformers in my data centers are Eaton. I'm Eaton, cradle-to-grave, from the utility switchgear coming all the way into my distribution. I've drunk the "Kool-Aid" of Eaton. What it allows me to do is that if I ever have a problem, I get to go to them and say, "Look, the whole thing is yours." It's cradle-to-grave. It's their product.

They're price-competitive and from a technical perspective they're at the top of the game. I could buy Square D, but then I'm buying Square D breakers. I'm buying somebody's UPS and somebody else's distribution and somebody else's paralleling gear. The fact that I can pick up the phone and call one vendor and say, "Here, design this for me end-to-end," and they say, "Okay, not a problem," saves me time and headaches.

I did have a problem with one design.  The project fell just short of specifications.  After working with the engineering department a solution was put in place.  In the end the issue was resolve! 

It's hard to say how much downtime the solution has saved our organization because, other than the unit getting wet, long story, I haven't had any power outages in ten years now. The Data Center I have has never been down due to a power outage.  We've seen blinks in power transfers from the utility company, but to me it's an unquantifiable number, unless you're seeing really bad power all the time, where you're seeing brownouts and blackouts. I haven't had a power outage in any of the Eaton systems that I have. 

In terms of maintenance, somebody comes out twice a year. We do a major/minor PM on all our enterprise UPS units. During the first visit they check the software, the firmware, the alarms. On a "major" they upgrade the firmware. The units have to be shut them down,  everything is checked, make sure all the connections are tight, the caps are tight. They do electrical tests, all the capacitors and the electrical components, making sure everything is solid and tight. The battery comes out twice a year, although for the VRLAs I have them come out quarterly. They check every battery, every connection. They make sure the volts and ohms are right, the right resistance. That's one of the reasons these units work so long, because we do a lot of maintenance. 

Other than that, we track and trend all our UPS units every few minutes.  My operations center watches all our system 24/7.  Alarms are reviewed near real time. The care and feeding of these units, to me, is no different than the care and feeding of any other critical system.

I would rate Eaton as a corporation, not the Eaton UPS, as a nine out of ten. In a world like mine, I don't build relationships based on products. I build relationships based on the sales and service teams. If I'm buying a lot of product from a company but the salesperson leaves the company, I will evaluate the value of the my relationship.  There is a potential I will follow the sales and service teams.  The relationship is with the person, not the company. The Eaton people that have come to the table nationwide have been stellar.

I would rate Eaton UPSs at as a nine as well. There are little things they could do, like fix their interfaces and give me more data.

UPSs are supporting critical load for data center colocation, and that is true across our national portfolio. We run real estate, but our real estate is "critical-load real estate." We've got data center floors that we lease space out to for IT companies. Those IT companies can be using a rack - a single equipment cabinet - or they can be 25,000 square feet of a data center hall for their enterprise. It's a mixed environment, although we try to specialize at each of our locations in a certain sweet spot. We also have shelf space that we lease to companies, large companies which come in and bring their own UPSs and run that space themselves. It's a good world to be in. I learned by watching some of our customers doing things that were mistakes. I get to learn from their mistakes.

In Denver, we've got four strings. Each string has four 750 kVA UPS modules. I'm using them in Cleveland as well. I've got three systems there, and each system has three 750 kVA modules.

Our organization has always had UPSs; that's part of the business that we do and we do rely on UPSs. Each of our locations, at some point during the year, switches over to UPS before we transition to generators. They are used actively every year. Our organization functions by supplying UPS.

I've got a critical-load bill from the utility here in Denver which runs about $130,000 monthly. That critical-load ESS mode moves us from 92 percent efficiency in the UPS to 99 percent efficiency in the UPS. It saves me a seven percent delta between my UPSs which are running pretty much all of that $130,000. It equates to about $11,000 monthly that it saves me if I'm in ESS.

Also, the inherent functionality of a UPS is that you're running your load on batteries. Utilities across the country these days are very dirty, more so on the brownout side than on the spike side, but computer equipment doesn't like unsteady power. So for our customers, it saves them a good amount of money in the failure rate from the equipment that's plugged into the UPSs because they're getting a steady load, steady power.

The way to look at it would be is if we did not have a UPS. If we had to switch over to generators from the utility power, there would be outages. Each one of our contracts with our customers has service level agreements that guarantee 100 percent power availability. Just considering our Denver facility, it has had 100 percent power availability since 1997. It's the integrity that the UPS provides the company that allows us to lease the space that we lease for colocation customers.

We use PredictPulse and the more information I can have from a predictive standpoint, the better I am at preparing my customers. When I talk about 100 percent availability, that is including any maintenance windows. Both our "A" and our "B" power sides are always 100 percent energized. When we do work, we transition from one system and put that load on the surviving system. It is a process. It is not something that can happen quickly, and it takes a lot of planning. In any kind of situation where I can get more information from the machine, telling me that something's going to need to be replaced before it actually fails, the greater the advantage I have in preparing the process for transition.

The most valuable feature is the control. We started with PredictPulse at the very beginning. Eaton could not get it to function properly. We got to a stage where we said, "We're just going to ignore PredictPulse because we can't get it to operate and you can't get it to operate." Eaton did step up and they got it to operate in our Denver facility, and now we couldn't live life without it. It does add a level of comfort knowing that PredictPulse is telling us about potential errors before they happen.

My preference is to keep it in ESS mode. It saves me a good amount of money. I've watched it work, flip back and forth with utility outages, and I've got complete comfort that the switching supports our critical load in a timely manner. We do drop out of ESS if there are severe storms in the area, or the utility is proving to be a little unreliable. That's simply because it concerns us when the UPS is switching back and forth so often. But it has been good.

The footprint is also good. I always want it smaller, but I always want to be able to have more room to do things inside it, so I definitely understand that give and take. The good thing is that it fits in the same space as my old UPSs. It is a little bit smaller, but it's a little bit larger than the Toshiba that we have. But size is not an issue in size, at least in my implementation.

I do like the ESS mode which I operate with the 9395s. However, I've got an issue with one of my UPS strings here in Denver: That ESS mode is too sensitive to utility noise. The utility shows no outages but I've got the UPS switching it in and out of ESS mode. That's a little bit aggravating and it's a concern that Eaton hasn't been able to remedy that yet. I don't know if that's Eaton or my manager who is dragging their feet.

I like the touch screen. I don't like the fact that they've decreased the size of the touch screen. I'm actively installing a new 9395 system right now. It's operating, but the commission is in two weeks. These new modules came in, and I found that they had moved from a larger ten-inch screen to a seven-inch screen, which is a big reduction in size. I didn't like the fact that they said, "Well, we can give you the larger screen, but it's going to cost you more money because these are being phased out." This was at the time that a company was saying, "Let's partner," and we had been partnered together for four or five years. There were two issues: Number one is that I don't like that we found it out once the piece of equipment was delivered to us, that we weren't told beforehand that that change had taken place. And number two is that they then wanted to charge me $27,000 to go to the screen that's on all my other UPSs. I voiced my frustration about that and their response was, "Yeah, they're being phased out."

Regarding the integration between the UPS and the batteries, I would say the same thing about any UPS manufacturer right now. I'm not sure if Eaton has started using lithium-ion, but it's almost like you have a UPS sitting there which feeds a string of UPS batteries, and then you get a battery monitoring system, which is another item. Although right now it doesn't hamper our operation, I would like for Eaton to figure out a way to integrate the batteries more seamlessly into a UPS system.

I definitely selected the Eaton UPS based on the features and their capabilities. They're continuing down the road with that. They produced a Unity system and there's no power factor within the system, so that's a plus. I know they've gone to a one-megawatt system. I would like for them to get a larger system in the future and I know they're working on that. I would like the system to be able to support maybe 1.5 to 1.8 megawatts per UPS string. I don't know what interval they're working on. They've moved up, I think, to a 1.1 meg from the 750s. There's a very small market for that, but we've got facilities where we used to operate at one or two megawatts and now they're operating at five or ten megawatts. The power requirements for the new IT systems are a lot higher.

My impressions of the stability of Eaton UPSs has been good. 

I've installed six Eaton 9395s. Three of them had failures when they were one week old. The good part about that is all three of them happened before we had critical load on them. It does seem like they need to be tested a little bit more at the factory. 

When I did a factory witness test in Raleigh for this last one, the problem was that they were getting fan alarms on the maintenance panels. When I asked about the fan alarms, the factory engineer told me, "Well yeah, that's because they've gone with cheaper fans, and the cheaper fans don't have a high enough speed to keep from having a fan alarm." I said, "Well, this test has failed, and I won't accept this unless you replace all the fans." They did. But the thought of them waiting for a customer to catch that just aggravated me.

I'm a proponent of Eaton. I like their technology, but I think they're trying to cut corners now and they need to stop it.

They scale well. We use the 750 interval. 

I do have considerable information for the smaller modular systems which are great systems. I haven't found an application for them, but when I do I would love to have the opportunity to implement one. That's a valuable aspect, where you can actually do plug-and-play. You could expand a UPS system without taking down your primary load.

I've contacted first- second-, and third-tier, tech support - all of them. I have had some issues with their first tier. I've actually had facilities managers contact them to put in four-hour-response service calls and they've been asked for a credit card so that they could charge the $800 service fee upfront. I didn't take it very well and I did escalate that and it did get taken care of. But that's a little bit of a slap in the face when you're spending, five or six million dollars a year with a company, even though we're a little fish.

There all those kinds of issues. We've got 13 locations and I've got facilities managers who may call in for support and in normal situations, their tech support is very good. 

I'm having a little bit of issue because there's a little gap between warranty and annual support. I've got systems that are coming off of a three-year warranty and I'm trying to get Eaton to start putting us in a rotation for annual maintenance. Eaton doesn't do that on their own, which seems odd to me because that's money for them. So we're still trying to get those transitions to happen. It's a little quirky thing, but moving from a warranty period over to putting the machines on regular, paid, annual maintenance is not smooth.

I still have two Toshiba 9000 series UPSs in our Phoenix data center.

Eaton UPSs are inherently efficient. I replaced Liebert 500 and 600 series UPSs with these. The Liebert UPSs were about 40 percent efficient at the load level that we were at. These Eatons, even worst case, moved it to 90 percent. Toshiba would have saved me money. Any of the newer UPSs would have saved similar amounts. Just moving to a newer UPS saved me lots of money.

The setup is complicated, more than it needs to be, by electricians who are charging you more than they need to charge you.

However, from a manufacturing standpoint, the actual setup and install of the UPS is fairly simplistic. It's a box you need to plug into power, and then you plug critical load into it, and you plug batteries into it. When I install a UPS, I judge by the cost to install versus the product cost. That's kind of a double-edge sword because I try to get my product costs down real low. But when the cost to install starts ballooning over the cost of the product, then to me, the install is too complicated. In a greenfield situation with an Eaton UPS, it's probably 25 to 30 percent of the cost of the UPS. But where I'm installing and retrofitting existing data centers, it's probably 100 percent to 125 percent of the UPS. And that's because I'm mandating that, in the process of installing a UPS, they have to keep my critical-load up on something. So that does increase the cost. I don't think Eaton has much control over that, unless you're buying - and we do - the installation from Eaton. Even in that instance, it's still back to the electricians. They're just passing through the electrician's cost.

Deployment generally takes three to four months from the order to installation, if no additional switchgear is required. Switchgear has something like a ten-month waiting period. Once we have the Eaton unit it can usually be installed over a two- to three-week period, if the prep work has been done beforehand.

Our deployment strategy is specific to each location. Looking at Denver, each time we've replaced one in Denver we put the unit on order and we then sit down and design the way the load will be actively switched over to a different UPS. We may or may not require reconfiguration of switchgear. Then, when the units arrive, we use Eaton CSEs who come out and unpack and install the unit itself. At the same time, we've got electricians replacing or building the battery distribution breakers. Once Eaton does a field-start on the unit, then we will plan a third-party commissioner to come out and commission the unit under load.

In terms of the number of people involved in a setup, I've seen groups of eight to ten electricians at the peaks. Then it drops down and you're going to have one controls-person, Eaton, and four to six electricians. And there is the H5 person watching over them, whether they're an electrical manager, a facilities manager, or a project manager. It will just be one body from an H5 standpoint, usually, who's controlling what's happening.

Once it's deployed, it will usually be one person taking care of and scheduling maintenance. A number of our buildings have building engineering staff, so these are fed into a BMS (building management system). So the UPS would actually be feeding signals to a BMS, whether it be JCI, Metasys, or Honeywell EBI. The building engineers will get alarms based on that and, usually, we run a staff of one to two building engineers, 24/7 at our facilities. Those building engineers are not dedicated to the UPS, they're dedicated to the whole building. The mechanical portions of the building take some 80 percent of their time. If we get an alarm from a UPS it's usually a failure of the UPS or the utility.

Our third-party commissioner for Denver is called Primary Integration. We've used a couple of other services but only one time. Primary Integration is the only one that we continue to use, that we're happy with their performance.

The UPSs are an expense that I've got to have, but I'm gaining the return in the revenue for colocation.

The cost per unit, as a rough estimate, is $300,000 per UPS 750-block.

The only additional services would be the maintenance we do. I don't know the exact costs of that at each location, but at Cleveland or Denver I believe we're paying about 35,000 a year per maintenance contract.

We actually looked at the market and we liked the Eaton UPS from an efficiency standpoint. They were really close to the Mitsubishi or Toshiba UPSs. We talked with both manufacturers' support teams and we like the closeness of Eaton's manufacturing to their technical team - the way they're entwined - so that they experience lessons-learned a lot quicker than an outside, third-party team that would be doing the support and feeding back to the factory. Eaton's service and engineers were one of the deciding factors for us.

I believe that Eaton is starting to lose some of its expert field-team components, so I am a little concerned currently, but that's just been in the last year. All of their key, field support team engineers and technicians are leaving. When they leave, it's kind of a big gap.

Toshiba was a little less expensive. The Toshiba had, I thought, a little better meantime between failure but, again, my concern was in maintenance and keeping the Toshiba current. That is a con, but on the other side is the fact that the Toshiba could readily be supported by a third-party, so maintenance going forward had a tendency to be a little cheaper.

Quality of maintenance is always a concern. With a third-party, it's a larger concern. Eaton really took care of all my concerns early on with the quality of their maintenance. That was good since I couldn't go anywhere else for maintenance.

The fact that I'm now seeing some of their field engineering diminish in quality - and don't get me wrong, I've not experienced any impact, but I'm seeing that there's a risk - creates a concern because there is no third-party I can go to. Where, with Toshiba, if I don't like what's happening to a third-party maintenance vendor, I can go to another third-party maintenance vendor who's supporting Toshiba.

You've got to design it well into your system, as with any UPS. The UPS can't do things that the switchgear doesn't give it the availability to do. Also, it's only as good as the last maintenance that was performed on it.

The biggest thing, as far as the UPS units themselves goes, is that people have a tendency to forget about the UPS units. They're always on standby and nobody thinks about them until there's actually an outage. The good part about the UPS is it's an active component in the data center stream, in what we deliver to our colocation customers. The big component is the flexibility of a UPS to switch load from module to module; seamlessly is the biggest positive. We forget that sometimes when it's just sitting there humming.

The lessons I've learned are around attention to detail. Make sure, when you open your door to let somebody in to work on batteries for you, that you know who that person is, that the person has not been working on batteries for only six months and before that they were working at the McDonald's. Most of the issues are caused by lack of process, which is aggravated by lack of expertise in people.

I'm not using Eaton's lithium-ion batteries. I'm waiting for the next battery model. I'm concerned on a number of levels with lithium-ion, more from a regulatory standpoint. I believe that once lithium-ion proliferates within the industry, that the fire code is going to change terribly. Unfortunately, I believe it's going to affect me whether I go with lithium-ion or not. But if we slow the distribution of lithium-ion, it'll at least slow down the regulatory requirements for all batteries in data centers. I always try to make a five-year investment in batteries. The battery technology is changing quickly and in another five years there'll be something that either rivals lithium-ion, at least, or that is a lot better. Lithium-ion is going to be a lot more controlled in the future. Thermal runaway has always been a problem in data centers, even though lead-acid combatted it a lot better. Lithium-ion still has the problems, and that's what causes them to burn up.

Eaton has a product called Foreseer. Foreseer is a wonderful product that can be purchased as an add-on. Eaton doesn't communicate about or advertise that product very well. That product does supply an unlimited amount of information about the electrical systems tied into the UPS. That information is vital to me, but you don't know about any of that information when you purchase an Eaton UPS. I found out more about it from a third-party distributor. You buy Foreseer from Eaton and then they integrate Foreseer into your system. At that time I thought, "That's a wonderful system and it's probably one of the top two in the market," but Eaton doesn't sell it well.

As a data center operator, my highest efficiency is running the UPS as heavily loaded as I can get it. The problem today is that I've got an A and a B side, and I need 100 percent failover capability. So the best I can achieve is about 50 percent load, if I don't oversubscribe. Am I thinking about oversubscribing my UPS? The answer would be is "yes," I always think about it, but customers don't like me to do that. We're looking to implement DSM over the portfolio. Right now it's spotty. With the implementation of DSM, we can comfortably oversubscribe and monitor that utilization more closely. With that implementation, I would increase the percentage of critical load on my UPS or the percentage of utilization. I would take it up to about 70 percent, but I wouldn't be comfortable taking it any higher than that.

I would rate Eaton UPSs at eight out of ten. A couple of items that I spoke about above are what brings it back to an eight. I would probably rate Eaton, as a whole, a little bit lower.

I'm rating it at eight because of the fact that none of the "infant mortality" happened under critical load. If it had happened under critical load, I probably would have rated it lower, but they've been lucky - or we've been lucky - so it gets an eight right now.

I do believe that the folks within Eaton all work extremely well in supporting me in servicing our company. That's what keeps me with Eaton. All UPSs are advancing now at about the same rate. An Eaton or a Toshiba or a Mitsubishi or even Schneider all offer similar qualities. It's really the Eaton teams that keep me with Eaton right now.

We use them for network backup or lab backup. These are critical environments for us, environments that we want to keep up in case of loss of power. They have high business impact. We have about 100 Eaton UPSs deployed.

The versions we are currently using that are the new standard are the 93PMs. But we have used all the other ones, the 9390s, the 95s, the 9350s, the 9355s - almost their whole product line.

They provide us reliable battery backup. They also provide energy savings that other units may not provide.

We have instances all the time where we are glad that we have UPSs. There are usually utility problems here or there. We're a pretty large campus and we're pretty spread out throughout the Puget Sound area. Whenever there's a utility event, we're glad we have battery backup through Eaton's units. In the last two months, we've had three utility power events where we had to go to battery. All 100 of the Eaton UPSs did their job and kept the equipment online that we want online. If the UPSs weren't in place, we would've lost power to revenue-generating spaces or to critical environments that need to stay up. That would impact the business and impact our ability to do our jobs.

The savings, by not being down, in terms of impact on revenue, is probably in the millions of dollars a year. It's a tough number to pin down for us. There are some places where it's a network location and there isn't much of an impact on anybody; just the network goes down and there's an issue of productivity for an entire building. But then you have a lab that is being backed up, a lab that generates $1,000,000 every five minutes and that's kind of hard to equate. So the actual savings could go back and forth. I would feel comfortable saying millions a year in savings or in business-impact avoidance.

We like the ESS, the Energy Saver System. It saves us on our electrical bill. That's a good feature. There's are two parts to that. By using the ESS, we get a rebate from the local utility of about half-a-million dollars. The actual savings over the year are probably only about $4,000, but I don't know if that is per unit or for the room where we did the study. It provides us a moderate amount of electrical savings throughout the lifetime of the unit.

We also like the modular system and the easy-to-read display. 

The touch-screen functionality is easy to read. There are tabs at the top and there are statuses at the top, graphics that give you a quick glance. We use the touch-screen for metering, to make sure the input and output meters are good. We also check alarm events and system history. Those are the things we usually check the most.

In addition to the display, there's a color methodology to the front display on the front cabinet. There are green, red, or amber. They provide quick graphics to understand if we have a real problem or a minor problem. The Eaton UPSs are user-friendly.

From a functional standpoint, I don't have any issues. From a communication standpoint, I don't have any issues. Outside of a full-service contract, my only concern is technician availability for repairs. Where we don't have a full-service contract with them, which unfortunately is the larger portion of our equipment from them, we're just like anybody else, waiting for a slot for a technician to arrive.

It is a risk, but when you're a big client like we are, they move other people around to get us serviced. If I was a smaller client, I would be at the bottom of the barrel and that would probably be annoying.

The stability has been perfect. I don't have any real issues with them except that they recently put out a service bulletin. They're here fixing that issue. That's kind of like a recall on a car. I almost don't want to mention that because it's not that big of a deal, but it's one of the more recent issues that has become something of a problem.

The scalability is great. You usually just swap in another power module. If we put in a 50 kVA unit and we want to upsize, or the customer wants to upsize, typically we can either just throw in one more power module to bring them up to double, or we just add another power module cabinet and then we add more capacity.

Tech support is good. I don't have any issues. I usually reach out to someone via email. Usually, when I call, I get forwarded to an engineer or I have to wait until somebody to call me back. Normally, what I end up doing is that if I have a problem that I think impacts us or our customer, I'll just send an email to one of their service managers or one of their sales managers. The response time is usually good. I get a pretty immediate response, definitely within the day.

We use a T&M contract with them in general, but for one of our offsite locations we do have a full-service contract with them. The latter, in terms of battery/parts replacement, remote monitoring, and prevention of UPS failures is fine. I don't have any issues with it. Once they're under full contract, they're pretty responsive and able to dispatch somebody immediately. I believe we have parts coverage with that full-service contract and they usually have the parts fairly quickly.

The other UPSs we're using are from Eaton's direct competitors, which is Vertiv or Liebert.

I do not do the setups, but I have spoken to the electrical vendors who do them and they don't have any real issues with them. It's pretty straightforward. They've probably installed 50 of them over the last couple of years. It takes about a day for them to get one all set up and then we bring Eaton in for the factory start-up. It's usually done over the course of a weekend.

We just did an install and we had two to three electricians from our staff involved because we have to run conduit and new pipe and bending. It's usually two to three of our electricians and one to two of the Eaton technicians who show up for start-up.

We use a third-party electrician, Valley or Cochran. Our technicians are more on the maintenance side. They don't do installs.

Our experience with both third-parties has been good. They're direct competitors and they each get about 50/50 of the work here. We're fine with either one.

The ROI is mostly in saving us from losing money, which would be in the millions of dollars. The return on investment would also be captured through the ESS program. However, even if that is $4,000 a year, it's going to be quite a while before we get to ROI. To get to ROI, we have to have the machine set in place for its full life cycle, which is 20 years.

That means a lot of the new ones are still 20 years out, but we've got some machines that are 20 years old and still in service. Over their lifetimes we've probably gotten back our money.

I usually get the pricing of the overall project when it's complete. I want to say they are around $50,000 to $70,000 depending on the options and the modules that we get.

With Eaton - and this is something of a detractor - I have to give them a PO with a minimum dollar amount. With Vertiv, I just have to call them out. I don't have to give them a PO upfront. They know we're going to pay so they don't need that. It gets them on campus quicker. With Eaton, I have to go through the entire payment process and I don't understand that, given that we're as large as we are as a company and do so much business with them. That's something to flag as our biggest gripe.

As for services costs, I don't know what they are. Their full-service contract is pretty expensive, but we normally don't buy that, so I don't know if they're competitive within the market itself. We only have a service contract like that with Eaton at one site. That site with the full-service has 50 UPSs and it's more expensive than the site where I have 100 UPSs which are only on a T&M contract. For us, the full-service is on the expensive end, but I don't have any comparison. I don't know what Vertiv's price would be on that.

We try to be fair to both of our vendors that are competitors. We do a 50/50 split. If we do Eaton on one job, maybe we'll do Vertiv on the next job. I don't really have a preference. If I can keep it to those two, we're pretty good. I don't have any issues that would make one worse or better than the other.

We're fairly happy with using Eaton products. I'm confident that if someone says they're going to install Eaton, they're getting a good product, that it's reliable and they won't have too many issues with it. And if they don't know anything about UPSs, they should get the service plan. If they're moderately knowledgeable about the UPSs they should just stick with a T&M.

The footprint is good. It's definitely in line with their competitors. They've all gone to a modular system across the entire industry. So instead of having one big cabinet for the IO and then one big cabinet for all the power modules, DC caps, etc., they've modularized them. They're in separate modules which lets them reduce the footprint. The footprint is fine for both IT and lab applications.

We have one installation on campus with their lithium-ion batteries. We are piloting them. We will play with them for about a year before we move forward with them in a bigger footprint on campus. The lithium-ion batteries were not a factor in our decision to go with this solution. We already use Eaton no matter what.

The Eaton UPSs do require maintenance. They have an OEM suggested maintenance, which we perform. We have to touch them four times a year. On my staff I've got three technicians. We also bring in one technician from a third-party vendor, MC Dean, for the annual services. In total, within one year, we're talking a team of four. For normal, run-through-the-year maintenance, when we to have to do this or that with a unit, there are five people on staff, including me. Three of them are PM techs. They do the battery PMs and the semi-annual services, and then we have the one technician from MC Dean who does the annual services. I've also got one technician who does all the communications side of the UPSs, who makes sure they are up and running, that they stay connected to our monitoring system, and he reviews and accepts alarms.

I would give Eaton products a ten out of ten, but overall, including service and everything, I'd give them an eight out of ten.