Power Protection Solution Saved The Day

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About Retail Assist

Retail Assist is the market-leading provider of selectively outsourced, made-to-measure IT support and development services to the retail sector. Clients include adams kids, Warehouse, Principles, Oasis, Coast, Harvey Nichols, New Look, Selfridges, Thresher Group and Odin Retail.

Many prominent retail chains in the UK - household names - each with in excess of 250 high street outlets outsource their IT infrastructure and data processing to Retail Assist, the UK's number one in this sector. It has offices in London, Bingham, Nottingham and the Data Centre in Northampton. The power to its critical systems is protected by equipment supplied and maintained by Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited.

"Our clients depend on their systems, I depend on the power to run them. In order to properly protect all of our critical systems in our data centre we installed a power protection solution which comprises a PowerWAVE5000 series UPS and a standby diesel generator."

The Interruption of the utility supply: Andy Struthers of Retail Assist continued: "The data centre recently experienced an interruption to the utility electricity supply that lasted approximately 18 hours. The first we knew about it was when one of our night shift operators heard the diesel-generator start up in the early hours of the morning. Despite the utility power failure all of our critical equipment and systems continued to run as if nothing had happened."

The restoration of power: "Approximately 18 hours later, when the utility company had repaired the fault, they informed me that the incident had been caused by a weakened underground joint. When utility power was eventually restored our UPS managed the transfer back to mains power. The generator automatically stopped and we were once again fully powered by the utility mains."

David Bond, Managing Director of Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited analysing the incident explained: "Retail Assist's standby diesel generator is configured to automatically start when there is a utility mains failure. This auto-start takes typically 10 seconds and during this time the critical load is powered only by their PowerWAVE5000 series UPS. The UPS serves two main functions, firstly it continuously conditions the mains or generator voltage to ensure that Retail Assist's critical load receives only the highest quality power. Secondly, using its battery back up, it ensures continuous power to the critical load."

Andy Struthers reflecting on the incident, commented "None of our servers either experienced or logged any unusual event during the utility power failure. It's reassuring to know that the power protection solution performed as intended and that our business operations remained uninterrupted! The experience has increased our confidence in our ability to provide uninterrupted service to our customers in the retail sector."