Building in standby power redundancy for greater protection levels
For greater assurance of 24/7 power availability at all times, standby power redundancy has now become commonplace in many systems that require 99.99% uptime.
Standby power redundancy is often included within a system at UPS level but can also be added at generator level.
Should there be a failure within one system, there is always a secondary backup system able to accept the power load.
This can also be beneficial during maintenance where if one system is being serviced, there is always a “live” system available should mains power fail.
Commonly termed “N+1” (incorporating 2 mirrored systems) standby power redundancy can be extended even further to N+2 or even N+3 configurations to cover ultra-critical systems and provide almost 100% “guaranteed” power cover should standby power be required.
Redundancy is essential for mission-critical applications, such as in data centres or in demanding environments like industrial process control where downtime for any reason is a costly and unwelcome interruption.
In an IT environment, this design is complementary to the RAID array and hot-standby fileservers and like those technologies is directed to removing single point-of-failure weaknesses.