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, 24x7 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
24x7 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
