Credit Agricole

“We quickly experienced how invaluable Cellwatch battery monitoring is and how it saved us from a potential failure.” — Phillipe Dubai, Project Manager / M&E Expert, Credit Agricole Immobilier

Situation

In 2010, Credit Agricole, the largest retail banking group in France and the second largest in Europe, built two new data centers to support data center operations at its world headquarters in Paris. With the new data centers online, data center managers decided to take a closer look at the backup systems in Paris. Recognizing there was still a risk of losing critical uptime, they began an evaluation of an automated battery monitoring system. The monitoring assessment led facility engineers to connect with engineers at a major global financial organization in London to see how they were using battery monitoring and what impact it was having on their data center and battery management.

Solution

After consulting with the engineering team in London, Credit Agricole learned  there would be significant immediate savings in reduced maintenance costs associated with monthly manual battery tests. They also discovered they  could extend battery life if they began monitoring their batteries and, therefore,         proceeded with the installation of a Cellwatch battery monitoring system in   February 2013.   With similar site configurations as the site in London,  Credit Agricole engineers were confident they could immediately scale back their preventive maintenance practices to realize cost savings and gain greater visibility into battery performance of their 440 12V jars.

Results

Upon startup of the Cellwatch system at the Paris data center (Pasteur 1 & 3), facility engineers performed load bank tests to define a battery capacity baseline for comparison during future testing. Cellwatch immediately identified two failing jars and triggered an alarm. Cellwatch captures unprecedented data, and in  this case the system was   monitoring a discharge event. During a discharge, the system records the performance of every cell on every string in discharge every few seconds. This ensures the exact performance of each jar can be validated. Having this performance validation ensures not only that the battery can perform during a discharge but also validates that the battery can provide the proper voltage for the full duration of the designed battery capacity. IEEE recommends annual battery load tests and Cellwatch supports these tests with a complete jar-by-jar record of the test.

Comments

“We were not expecting to experience such immediate value from Cellwatch. We suspected it would happen, but that it would take months, not minutes. As soon as we flipped the switch, Cellwatch alerted us to two failing jars, delivering instant confidence in its ability to perform exactly as promised. We quickly experienced how invaluable Cellwatch battery monitoring is and how it saved us from a potential failure.”

Phillipe Dubai, Project Manager / M & E Expert, Credit Agricole Immobilier