Southern Union Data Center

“With Cellwatch, we have complete confidence that our backup batteries are going to work when we need them.”—Joe Montemayor, Southern Union Data Center Operations Manager

Situation

Uninterrupted power is crucial for Southern Union Data Center, a co‐location data center responsible for providing safe, reliable and secure data center services to small, medium and large companies. Customers have found that a co‐location data center is a cost‐effective alternative to building and operating their own computer rooms. Due to the critical nature of the business, downtime is never an option.

Solution

The data center features two UPS systems totaling 640 batteries and was performing quarterly battery checks to ensure uptime. When data center operations manager Joe Montemayor was recently approached by a power quality expert about installing a Cellwatch battery monitoring system to more effectively guarantee UPS uptime and save on UPS maintenance costs, he quickly realized that Cellwatch battery monitoring was going to be the best way to meet their growing data center requirements.

Results

By deploying the Cellwatch system the company has gained improved reliability with 24X7 monitoring of all 640 batteries. Cellwatch has proven to be more effective than quarterly preventive maintenance by detecting bad or failing batteries instantly and sending immediate notifications to data center staff when there is an issue.

Comments

“Before installing Cellwatch, we would find batteries that needed to be replaced during our quarterly inspections. Because Cellwatch monitors our batteries every few hours, every day, we now perform annual battery checks only to verify connections.

“Additionally, our data center staff can see the status of our batteries anytime they want. Anytime a battery is out of range, we are immediately notified and can remedy the situation very quickly. The biggest winner for us is that if we receive a notification in the morning, we can often times have the battery changed out within a few hours.”

‐‐Joe Montemayor, Southern Union Data Center Operations Manager