Small Business Battery Backup: Eaton's 3,000VA PW5130

Features
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Networked Power Management: Options

The MGE software by Powerware supports email notification.

The email notification feature is fairly standard in business-class battery backup. You can define an email server, sender, recipient, and the message in sufficient detail. In addition, you can select the notification level, which basically is a threshold that specifies the gravity of the event to cause notification, such as “critical,” “major,” or just information. However, it is not possible to define different user groups that would allow informing different people of various events.

Outlet Groups

Four out of the eight power plugs of the PW5130 are grouped into two additional outlet groups, which can be configured separately.

The Powerware device offers four power outlets within the main power group, and two additional power groups with two outlets each, which can be configured separately. In our example, we defined group 1 to be switched off once the battery reaches 30%. There are multiple criteria that can be set for each of the outlet groups: in addition to  the battery charge level, you can set a shutdown and a startup timer.

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Device Strategies

More attached devices also mean more responsibility in choosing the right outlets for various devices, as the wrong backup strategy may be counter-productive.

Less important devices that still require power when they are in standby (printers, for example) should be connected to an outlet group that completely switches off power at an early point to save the batteries. Some devices should not even receive battery power, such as displays, KVM switches, secondary network hardware, and so forth.

At the same time, critical devices, such as PoE switches for VoIP or routers, should receive power for as long as possible; this is also important because the Powerware device shutdown management only works with functioning network connections. This option sounds scary, as it would completely empty the battery and probably leave insufficient time for shutting down other systems. If you want to be sure you can sustain power to essential devices for a long time, we recommend purchasing a separate, simple UPS unit for them. In this case you can utilize the Powerware PW5130 to deploy a reasonable shutdown scenario across your connected systems.