Though power management and reliability are closely linked as far as IT is
concerned, power electronics is still not a focus area for most CIOs; instead it
becomes one of the infrastructure areas bundled with building designs. However,
that might be changing soon and, ironically, the curse of the 26th might be
responsible for this. The 26/7 Mumbai deluge and the 26/12 Chennai tsunami have
made many CIOs, particularly from the BPOs, BFSI and telecom sectors, realize
the necessity of a power management policy to achieve a 99.999% uptime, often
mandated for in the SLAs with their clients.
More and more enterprises are now looking at incorporating active power
management policies within their overall disaster management framework. At
least, many have started including power management as part of their DR plans so
that it comes under the purview of the CIOs. Any policy should ensure adequate
backups and redundancies-that can be with the help of state electricity boards
or UPSs or power supplies from different vendors. A proper power management
policy should be implemented not only for generators or UPS but also for output
distribution as well as the cabling part. Even this might not stop the entire
power failure, but at least its impact can be reduced.
Role of the CIO
In many organizations, power management historically did not come into the
CIOs purview, but was looked at by the administration managers. This lack of a
clear role is leading many CIOs to shirk their responsibilities regarding power
management issues. And, in some cases, CIOs might often lack the required
competency to handle power. However, in a changed environment, when a power
management policy is looked as an IT function, even CIOs need to gather
necessary domain expertise. With roles of CIOs anyway extending to handle
business processes, even their knowledge needs to extend beyond IT to cover
areas like power or EPABX, erstwhile considered admin issues.
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However, there is a contradictory viewpoint, that enterprises should have
separate power experts who would interact closely with the CIOs. The roles of
the two should be kept separate-CIOs should look after maintaining the IT
infrastructure; since this includes disaster management and power is a vital
component of any DR plan, they need to interact with the power experts but leave
the power management to them only. Both views, however, agree that power
management should not be consigned as another responsibility of the beleaguered
admin manager.
Bottlenecks
Enterprises need not have UPSs at all, or even power management policies, if
the government supplies right amount of power and at appropriate voltage. In
Western countries, power companies give guarantees on uptime on frequency and
voltage limits. The government policy on power need to change and private
companies should be encouraged to not only distribute but even generate power,
at least for critical sectors like healthcare which requires 24x7 power.
Government has to give way to private players who can provide quality power and
more reliable power so that organizations can depend less and less on UPS.
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Then, in certain parts of the country, the electric supply can fluctuate with
season and time. In some of the rural areas, the voltage goes very low in summer
because of demand. Power system should be able to take care of these seasonal
variations. Along with this, one needs to see if there are any single points of
failure down in the distribution chain that can cause power failure or
disruption in quality of power supplied. This is something that should be taken
care of immediately.
Essential Maintenance
Maintenance is a very important part of the power management policy. The
consultant or the power expert should have the expertise to do failure mode
affect analysis whereby he can evaluate each single failure of the cable, UPS or
the transformer. Any wrong operation in the failure mode affect analysis could
cause big damages. However, when we are talking of power equipment today, it is
not only about UPS systems.
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Therefore, the power expert should understand what type of power factors the
organization is maintaining. As a consultant who is talking about the entire
power management policy and various other aspects too, he must take into account
issues like reduced power factors and harmonic distortions that deteriorate the
entire network. The crux of the story is that whenever any equipment is going to
be installed in the organization premises, it has to be evaluated from the power
point also.