Regions Bank

“There is no wondering if we’ve got a failing or open cell – we always know our battery status.  We have complete confidence in our battery performance and ability to maintain uptime.”
–Terry Gurganus, MC Facilities, Critical Power Systems Manager – Regions Bank

Situation

Regions Bank is one of the nation’s largest financial services providers of consumer and
commercial banking.  Serving customers in 16 states across the South, Midwest and Texas, the bank
operates approximately 1,700 banking offices and 2,000 ATMs. With millions of customers relying on branch services and 24/7 access to their accounts, downtime is not an option.

Strategy

In 2002, what was then AmSouth Bank began construction on a 16,000 sq. ft.  data center in Birmingham, Alabama.  The electrical engineers spearheading the UPS installation recognized the batteries were the most critical piece of equipment to maintain 24/7 uptime; therefore specified a Cellwatch battery monitoring system to further protect them from an outage.  In 2006, AmSouth merged with Regions Bank and the AmSouth state-of-the-art Birmingham data center became the primary operating data center for the newly combined entity operating as Regions Bank.

Results

The Regions data center operates three shifts with16 facility  engineers responsible for visually operating and maintaining  all systems. Since Cellwatch constantly scans the batteries, managers compare it to having a dedicated engineer  physically watching each battery 24/7.  With continuous  monitoring, Cellwatch enables personnel to focus on other IT and data center tasks.  If a battery alarm is triggered, a   notification is sent to five different pagers ensuring multiple  engineers are informed immediately, allowing them to take appropriate action.

Comments

“Cellwatch, along with a few manual maintenance operations that aren’t supported electronically, has saved us from experiencing a possible devastating outage.  We initially deployed the battery monitoring system to only monitor our battery at a per jar level where we had 4 cells per monitoring point.
Our experience taught us it would be better to monitor our battery on a per cell basis so that we could narrow our alarm thresholds to trigger in a much narrower window. Therefore, we have since upgraded the system so each cell is now a separate monitored point and the slightest deviation of values is detected
immediately allowing corrective actions to occur even earlier. Cellwatch can now discover the first cell breakdown of a failing battery that could put our operation at risk. This ensures that no single open plate or connection in one cell could take out the entire battery string, making the UPS module no longer a viable back up system.  With every cell being monitored, the reliability is unbeatable. There is no wondering if we’ve got a failing or open cell – we always know our battery status.  We have complete confidence in our battery performance and ability to maintain uptime.

“Additionally, our entire team loves Cellwatch from a user perspective.  It is extremely easy to operate and analyze the data.  Cellwatch also offers a significant advantage in that it only taps the battery with an
incredibly light pulse to perform a resistance test, so we know we aren’t degrading our battery performance which we feel helps us extend the life of our batteries. Compared to its closest competitor in the market, it is a hands down choice not only in its very user-friendly operations and report generation, very clean and simple installation, but also in cost and manufacturers support. We at Regions Bank are very happy and satisfied with Cellwatch and would strongly recommend it to any company that has to rely on delivering uninterrupted power for very critical systems.”

Terry Gurganus, MC Facilities, Critical Power Systems Manager – Regions Bank