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Eaton Visual Power Manager (VPM)

Eaton helps bring clarity to city’s power environment

Home to approximately 95,000 residents, the city of Roswell is Georgia’s eighth largest city. Operating with a mayor/council form of government, the city’s services are executed through eight departments comprised of more than 40 divisions with 600 full-time and 300 part-time employees. Read how Eaton helps the city to focus on its core responsibilities rather than lose valuable time worrying about power quality or downtime threats.

Summary

Challenge

In addition to suffering frequent UPS and battery failures, the city had no way to view or manage power across its IT landscape.

Solution

Eaton Visual Power Manager (VPM), BladeUPS, 9PX, 5PX, UPS services

Results

Thanks to Eaton, the city of Roswell can now focus on its core responsibilities rather than lose valuable time worrying about power quality or downtime threats.

Challenge: bolstering reliability while gaining network visualisation

The city of Roswell required a robust power protection solution that could safeguard equipment and maintain uptime in the wake of frequent power quality problems, most notably thunderstorms. Although the city had installed a hodgepodge of different manufacturers’ UPSs throughout its facilities, the fleet was not providing adequate reliability.

The city needed to safeguard a range of equipment, including mission-critical servers, network fibre switches, routers, modems and dozens of PoE switches responsible for keeping traffic cameras, security alarms, parking gates and other devices up and running, in their main data centre, the police service and numerous outlying sites.

One of the biggest issues plaguing the city was that every time a power cut occurred, IT personnel had to be deployed into the field to manually reboot VoIP systems at remote locations.

“We were having power problems across the city and had no visualisation of the status of the UPS batteries or the power cycling capability. We were looking for something to help us manage our power and provide uptime between an outage and our generator kicking on.”

Maurice Pryce, IT director, city of Roswell

Solution: Eaton Visual Power Manager (VPM), BladeUPS, 9PX, 5PX, Eaton UPS services

Although the city had been plagued by ongoing performance problems with its UPSs, it recognised that the Eaton units deployed within its data centre always delivered exceptional reliability. That prompted officials to overhaul its mixed UPS line-up with nearly 50 new Eaton units, including a BladeUPS within the main data centre at City Hall – selected for its expandability, modularity and small footprint – and a 9PX inside the police station’s data centre.

The city also rolled out dozens of smaller Eaton 5PX and 9PX UPSs throughout various administration buildings, fire stations, police facilities and other sites. The units primarily protect PoE switches on a broad range of devices such as traffic cameras, where the city’s ability to view accidents helps to ensure a prompt response from emergency services.

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“We really liked that the 9PX was an online double-conversion unit, which provides a higher level of protection for the networking infrastructure at our more critical locations.”

Maurice Pryce, IT director, city of Roswell

The highlight of the project was Eaton’s Visual Power Manager (VPM) software, which provides the city’s IT team with the tools they need to monitor all power devices. Easy to deploy, VPM simplifies day-to-day monitoring and helps maintain business continuity. In addition, the city can obtain predefined customised reports, initiate mass firmware and configuration commands and gain a visual layout of its data centres – making it easy to stay in tune with trends as well as identify and resolve any issues.

“The visual aspect is especially important, because if it doesn’t look right, it’s hard for us to see what’s occurring. We really like having one pane of glass from which we can control all the devices and UPSs.”

Maurice Pryce, IT director, city of Roswell

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With robust capabilities and real-time monitoring to ensure continuous power to critical equipment, VPM is also instrumental in helping cities like Roswell maintain business continuity. For instance, the solution averts crashes from UPS and PDU overloads, provides failover and capacity simulation and enables control of PDU outlets and UPS load segments. Furthermore, up-to-the-minute statistics and reporting provide a quick way to identify potential issues, allowing time for personnel to react and take corrective action.

“With VPM, I am now able to see and control our entire power environment. I can watch the power cycle and if there’s an issue, see where it’s coming from and remedy it as needed.”

Maurice Pryce, IT director, city of Roswell

In addition to bolstering awareness across the city of Roswell’s power environment, VPM provides the ability to create customised reports, track trends and create customer billing/chargeback reports. The solution has also cured one of the city’s primary pain points.

“Before, whenever we had a power outage, our IT guys had to manually reboot our VoIP systems at outlying sites. Now they can do so remotely, which is a huge time saving.”

Maurice Pryce, IT director, city of Roswell

Results: With the Eaton solution, the city of Roswell is now able to:

• Ensure continuous uptime while safeguarding critical equipment against lightning strikes and dirty power
• View and manage its entire power environment with VPM
• Remotely reboot devices at outlying sites
• Detect potential vulnerabilities and proactively remedy them – before they become issues

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