University of Wyoming

“With the visibility that Cellwatch provides, we fully expect to get longer life out of our batteries – at least an additional two to three years.” — Wade Ettleman, University of Wyoming Assistant Data Center Manager

Situation

Located in Laramie, Wyoming, The University of Wyoming is the state’s only provider of baccalaureate and graduate education, research, and outreach services. In December of 2008, construction of the university’s new Information Technology Center (ITC) was complete and the new state‐of‐the‐art data center went online. Supporting nearly 14,000 students and staff, the data center hosts the university’s production computing systems that provide critical IT services required to operate the university.

Solution

In order to provide secure, 24×7 access to essential IT and data services, university IT directors knew they needed UPS battery monitoring to guarantee key systems would always be available when needed. The Cellwatch battery monitoring system was specified and installed to monitor the university’s 160 UPS batteries. Within one year of going online in the new data center, another Cellwatch system was installed to monitor 80 batteries in another campus data center, which is now part of the Wyoming Technology Business Center (WTBC), a not‐for‐profit business incubator that assists start‐up and growing companies.

Results

Upon installation in both data centers, Cellwatch immediately discovered bad batteries that would have otherwise gone undetected. With its daily ohmic measurement capability, Cellwatch automatically alerts data center specialists immediately if there are batteries that are out of range before they have the opportunity to fail during use. Having Cellwatch also makes it possible for data center management to reduce preventive maintenance costs and allows for budgeting of battery replacement rather than prematurely replacing batteries.

Comments

“The advantage to us is being able to watch each individual battery. It’s the granularity of detail we get – there is no mystery about which battery is going bad. Cellwatch is more valuable than preventive maintenance. Manually discharging each battery takes a lot of time, and having someone in your battery cabinet is not necessarily a good thing. Cellwatch has become such an essential component of our data center operation that we plan to add two additional systems before the end of 2010. With Cellwatch, we can safely ensure 24×7 uptime for the university.

“Another great benefit of the system is the ability to view battery status remotely and for users to receive email and text notifications if an issue arises. We can also keep a history file of our strings and watch for trends that indicate degraded capacity or poor connections without physically entering the cabinets.

“With Cellwatch, we can send battery data to our battery provider to prove we have a failing battery. This allows us to proactively schedule battery replacement, without having to deal with battery problems after they actually fail. With the visibility that Cellwatch provides, we fully expect to get longer life out of our batteries—at least an additional two to three years.”

‐‐Wade Ettleman, University of Wyoming Assistant Data Center Manager