Seven reasons why electrical protection is important
All the progress made in technology and electronics may become useless when faced with a serious issue that may affect companies of any size, as well as domestic users. We are referring to electrical blackouts.
Without electricity, all electrical devices will stop working, while at the same time causing real costs, lost work and even physical damage to said devices’ hardware.
It is therefore clear that no company can afford to have its IT devices operate without adequate protection against possible electrical dropouts and blackouts. And the statistics don’t lie: different studies point to an average of 15 annual blacouts capable of causing IT systems to malfunction.
The main reasons it is important to have proper electrical protection are:
- The electrical grid is not 100% reliable: although electrical companies continuously invest in the improvement of their distribution grids, there are external factors (storms, floods, accidents) that directly affect the quality of the supply. Even the consumers themselves create disturbances (motors, LED, low-quality devices) that also distort the grid's quality.
- The electrical grid is not stable: because electrical supply companies cannot provide an excellent level of quality, the possibility of them supplying voltage either above or below the nominal theoretical value has been regulated. This facility can cause serious issues to IT systems.
- Even brief blackouts are an issue: considering as such blackouts under 2 seconds, their consequences may entail the unavailability of the IT environments from 15 minutes (rapid restart) to several hours. Depending on the duration of the supply blackout, we may also encounter instantaneous (0.5 to 30 cycles), temporary (2 seconds to 2 minutes) or sustained (over 2 minutes) blakouts.
- Growing intensification of the issues and risks: the current storage systems, servers and associated network electronics use miniaturized components that are more sensitive to the supply issues than their predecessors from previous generations.
- Generator sets and transient voltage suppressors are insufficient: generator sets may be a good solution for long-duration blackouts, but they require start-up time and are not ideal against voltage spikes and other electrical disturbances. In the same manner, transient voltage suppressors protect against voltage spikes but not against blackouts, dropouts or voltage oscillations.
- Availability as an essential value: competition in business does not allow for failures in continuous operation. Therefore, any IT system shutdown means loss of business opportunities and gives an advantage to the competition in procuring customers.
- Availability is essential but at acceptable costs: the availability-cost correlation may be resolved favourably with highly efficient systems.
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