A Major Health Insurance Provider

“Cellwatch provides the monitoring visibility we need to help ensure we will always be up and running. Why wait for a bad battery and devastating consequences when you can catch it before it gets to that point?” – Data Center Lead Engineer, Major Health Insurance Provider

Situation

A major health insurance provider in the Northwestern United States with over one million members relies heavily on its data center to support the day‐to‐day operations of the business. From maintaining internal IT services, a call center, and the member website, the data center is the backbone of the business. Four UPS modules housing 600 batteries provide backup power protection to the facility. When a brief outage was experienced several years ago, company executives realized the vulnerability of the data center and as a result, preventing future outages became the number one priority.

Solution

One of several initiatives introduced by the data center’s engineering team was the Cellwatch battery monitoring system as a way to help eliminate outages and improve UPS uptime. When executives learned that Cellwatch could detect and warn against failing UPS batteries, thus avoiding downtime, the decision was made to install the Cellwatch battery monitoring system. Along with greater backup power reliability, engineers would now have the advantage of relying on Cellwatch data to schedule maintenance and battery replacements rather than the usual preventive maintenance method of replacing batteries that are still functional.

Results

Within three weeks of the installation, Cellwatch recorded higher than normal ohmic value readings on one of the batteries. Five days after the ohmic value spike, Cellwatch sent an alarm indicating the battery was on the verge of failure. Manual testing verified the failure and engineers replaced the battery before it completely failed, potentially avoiding an outage. Before installing Cellwatch, data center engineers performed manual battery tests every three months, now engineers scan the Cellwatch data every day to see if anything appears out of line, and complete visual checks to verify the physical integrity of the batteries. Personnel safety has significantly increased and the data center is no longer vulnerable to the time gaps left between manual testing.

Comments

“The most important aspect of having Cellwatch UPS battery monitoring is first and foremost, avoiding downtime. If a utility outage occurs, our batteries must carry the critical load until the generators come online. That may only take 30 seconds, but that is a crucial 30 seconds. It’s critical; our business can’t afford unscheduled downtime. Our data center is an absolute necessity – we provide the foundation and service of power, cooling and communication. The facility integrity should never be an issue for someone doing their job and meeting customer needs. Cellwatch provides the monitoring visibility we need to help ensure we will always be up and running. Why wait for a bad battery and devastating consequences when you can catch it before it gets to that point?”

‐‐Data Center Lead Engineer, Major Health Insurance Provider