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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.

Keyed In: Panel members at Bangalore

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.

Power Debate: Panel members at Chennai Vinayak Joshi (DGM-Mkt), DB Power Electronics at Bangalore

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.

-Vishwesharan, Macmillan Industries "Centralization helps in deployment of redundant UPSs and generators, and also helps in reducing TCO." -V Thiagarajan, Ashok Leyland "The battery is the weakest link in the entire power infrastructure today. By the time you find out that the battery is bad, it is usually too late to take any preventive measures." -Chandramoulashwaran, Polaris "EPABX was once considered an administrative responsibility, but it has now come into the hands of the CIOs and CTOs. Thanks to ICT convergence EPABX is becoming more IT-enabled. UPS too will one day become more IT enabled. Then the CIOs will play an important role in power management and power administration."

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.

Rajneesh De

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