I'm not an engineer or an electrician. For me, the ease/complexity of the setup is a hard question to answer because the field people do it. My observations are based on watching my electricians install my units and watching and working with the field engineers through the startup. It seems relatively straightforward. Plug component A into component B, run a wire from this terminal to that terminal. It seems very straightforward.

When the field techs have to do startups, it takes time to work through the details.  This is all scheduled!  When you're putting one, two, or two-and-a-half megawatts of UPS, there's an enormous amount of potential energy and danger. If they want to take a day or two to put these things in, I'm not going to argue with them, because I want it done right.

The installation depends on how fast you can put a 1000's of pounds of equipment.  You've just got to put big, heavy things in place and run big thick, heavy wires. You're running two dozen wires that are as big as your thumb and they're heavy; the wire is two-and-a-half pounds a foot. It's a lot of man-handling but I would say it's been relatively straightforward.

Is Eaton any better or different than any other UPS vendors on the market?  From providing backup power not really.  From how they do it, I can only say they have treated me well!

I do not do the setups, but I have spoken to the electrical vendors who do them and they don't have any real issues with them. It's pretty straightforward. They've probably installed 50 of them over the last couple of years. It takes about a day for them to get one all set up and then we bring Eaton in for the factory start-up. It's usually done over the course of a weekend.

We just did an install and we had two to three electricians from our staff involved because we have to run conduit and new pipe and bending. It's usually two to three of our electricians and one to two of the Eaton technicians who show up for start-up.

We did a UPS replacement, putting a newer UPS in a production data center. We did this without an outage, which we take a lot of pride in.

UPSs replacements are actually very complex. There is a lot of planning involved. It took almost six months to get it right.

There was a lot of planning involved for our implementation strategy. When you are replacing a single UPS unit, which is the heart of your production data centers, you have to make sure it is planned right. You have to make sure that it is on the money. There were a lot of high blood pressures during that period of time.

The initial setup was straightforward from the standpoint that they did a great job coordinating and installing it. However, from the customer perspective, the initial setup was complex. It was just very straightforward and easy to work with the Eaton team.

Our deployment took about a week. We needed to:

1. Do capacity planning. 
2. Have an electrical infrastructure put in place. 
3. Have the environmentals, the safe room, for the batteries to be in the AC.
4. Schedule the outage.

There is a lot of detail with:

• Setting up.
• Configuring.
• Building.
• Testing the system.
• Migration to the new system.
• The operation of it.

In summary, we have to test the system, migrate to the new system, and then have day two support.

The setup is complicated, more than it needs to be, by electricians who are charging you more than they need to charge you.

However, from a manufacturing standpoint, the actual setup and install of the UPS is fairly simplistic. It's a box you need to plug into power, and then you plug critical load into it, and you plug batteries into it. When I install a UPS, I judge by the cost to install versus the product cost. That's kind of a double-edge sword because I try to get my product costs down real low. But when the cost to install starts ballooning over the cost of the product, then to me, the install is too complicated. In a greenfield situation with an Eaton UPS, it's probably 25 to 30 percent of the cost of the UPS. But where I'm installing and retrofitting existing data centers, it's probably 100 percent to 125 percent of the UPS. And that's because I'm mandating that, in the process of installing a UPS, they have to keep my critical-load up on something. So that does increase the cost. I don't think Eaton has much control over that, unless you're buying - and we do - the installation from Eaton. Even in that instance, it's still back to the electricians. They're just passing through the electrician's cost.

Deployment generally takes three to four months from the order to installation, if no additional switchgear is required. Switchgear has something like a ten-month waiting period. Once we have the Eaton unit it can usually be installed over a two- to three-week period, if the prep work has been done beforehand.

Our deployment strategy is specific to each location. Looking at Denver, each time we've replaced one in Denver we put the unit on order and we then sit down and design the way the load will be actively switched over to a different UPS. We may or may not require reconfiguration of switchgear. Then, when the units arrive, we use Eaton CSEs who come out and unpack and install the unit itself. At the same time, we've got electricians replacing or building the battery distribution breakers. Once Eaton does a field-start on the unit, then we will plan a third-party commissioner to come out and commission the unit under load.

In terms of the number of people involved in a setup, I've seen groups of eight to ten electricians at the peaks. Then it drops down and you're going to have one controls-person, Eaton, and four to six electricians. And there is the H5 person watching over them, whether they're an electrical manager, a facilities manager, or a project manager. It will just be one body from an H5 standpoint, usually, who's controlling what's happening.

Once it's deployed, it will usually be one person taking care of and scheduling maintenance. A number of our buildings have building engineering staff, so these are fed into a BMS (building management system). So the UPS would actually be feeding signals to a BMS, whether it be JCI, Metasys, or Honeywell EBI. The building engineers will get alarms based on that and, usually, we run a staff of one to two building engineers, 24/7 at our facilities. Those building engineers are not dedicated to the UPS, they're dedicated to the whole building. The mechanical portions of the building take some 80 percent of their time. If we get an alarm from a UPS it's usually a failure of the UPS or the utility.

The purchasing experience and delivery were all excellent. They were very straightforward and easy to do. The actual installation was a little more complex.

The installation was a little bit different from the purchasing and delivery stages, only because I hadn't ever really been involved in replacing a UPS before. It seemed more cumbersome than I thought it would be. However, I didn't really have anything to compare it to. The difficulty seemed to come from having to hire a contractor to do the electrical work and prep, and then have him plug it in and set it up. Then, a person from Eaton had to actually come out and turn it on. That was the unusual part for me. I would have assumed that an Eaton person would have installed it and plugged it in. I'm not sure that reflects badly on Eaton. It's just the way things are done, but it was new to me.

In terms of our staff involved with the units, two technical services managers were the main ones who worked with Eaton, when spec'ing out the batteries.

I had to get a circuit running to me, but other than that I didn't have to have an electrician. That saved some money. In our distribution centers we have electricians, so that wouldn't cost me in those locations, but at the construction sites that I put it in, it would have.

The deployment, overall, is very straightforward. You just follow the cookie-cutter book that they give you to install the rack. Then their tech comes and, within a couple of hours, it's up and running. It easily takes less than a day.

We don't require any staff for maintenance. With my large UPS, I have a once-a-quarter maintenance program from the vendor, but this requires none. Three people in our organization interact with the Eaton UPS but that's a minor part of their jobs.

I've gone through every phase of these, from designing for them, to installing them, to maintaining them and doing the typical preventive maintenance stuff.

The initial setup was very easy. It's all modular. Installing a UPS is installing a UPS. You bring wires into it, you bring wires out of it. With this thing, it's a rack. Everything's plug-and-play. It's very simple to put this thing together. It's nothing a consumer would ever do, though. You need licensed electricians to come in and do this. Eaton does the startup service, so even when it gets powered on for the first time, you have them come out. They run it through a series of checks to make sure everything is good. UPS's are very dangerous. One thing wired backwards turns it into a hydrogen bomb so you have to be very careful.

In terms of deployment time, everybody's situation is going to be different. We've had different iterations of installation. We had power running under the floor before, and now it's overhead.

There's always a deployment plan. You have to get all the players there: your electrician, etc. For us it was complicated because of where things are located in a building that was built in the 70s. Other people aren't going to have the same experience as we had. 

I'm the only person in our organization who is doing deployment and maintenance of this solution, for this application. I am the data center manager, and if one of them doesn't work, everybody knows.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's very step-oriented. You just follow along; it's a simple process to follow.

Deployment of the product is typical. It's usually a six-week lead-time, which is typical of most equipment. It's not good, but it's just what is expected in the industry.

Our path is to use them in new buildings and new remodels.

It was installed in a day, but it took a while for it to be delivered. We had to hire somebody to bring it into the room where it was going to be installed, and then we had to bring in electricians. The setup itself was relatively straightforward. The hands-on time was pretty quick, but in terms of logistics, it took several weeks. At the end, somebody came from Eaton to turn it on.

We bought it indirectly through Elekta, which is the manufacturer of our Linear Accelerator, so the buying process was reasonable. Elekta purchased it for us. We paid Elekta and Elekta paid Eaton.

Elekta did the project management. The implementation was a little bit rough. We didn't fully understand what was needed, but that wasn't Eaton's fault.

We don't do anything to maintain it. It's pretty self-sufficient. The initial deployment required two people on our side, but that was just for one day.

We have to bring an Eaton tech out to do the initial setup. It's a specialized piece of equipment with proprietary information, programming, and all of that. You've got to make sure that all the parameters are right, so it's not something you can just do yourself.

Once it gets powered up and everything's wired up, it takes about an hour. There are no preparations that we need to do on our end before they implement.

Once they're up and running we need one person to maintain all the UPSs.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward.

It was simple to get it installed. We had it up and online quickly. It didn't take us very long to get it up and running. The process was seamless and easy to do.