We try to be fair to both of our vendors that are competitors. We do a 50/50 split. If we do Eaton on one job, maybe we'll do Vertiv on the next job. I don't really have a preference. If I can keep it to those two, we're pretty good. I don't have any issues that would make one worse or better than the other.

Eaton's power density is very competitive and very much right where they should be, especially compared with competitive, modular solutions.

You want to try and find a company who can provide support, is comfortable, and understands the product line. Product, familiarity with local contractors, and reputation of the product tends to be the driving force behind the different systems out there, because electrical contractors may have several options that they can go with.

You need to have electrical contractors who are familiar with a system. You could have a great system, but if you don't have a local provider who can help with the installation along with a good vendor, then you have a problem. On the other hand, you can have a marginal system, but if you have good support, then that works. Reputation, supportability, and reliability are the most important things.

We actually looked at the market and we liked the Eaton UPS from an efficiency standpoint. They were really close to the Mitsubishi or Toshiba UPSs. We talked with both manufacturers' support teams and we like the closeness of Eaton's manufacturing to their technical team - the way they're entwined - so that they experience lessons-learned a lot quicker than an outside, third-party team that would be doing the support and feeding back to the factory. Eaton's service and engineers were one of the deciding factors for us.

I believe that Eaton is starting to lose some of its expert field-team components, so I am a little concerned currently, but that's just been in the last year. All of their key, field support team engineers and technicians are leaving. When they leave, it's kind of a big gap.

Toshiba was a little less expensive. The Toshiba had, I thought, a little better meantime between failure but, again, my concern was in maintenance and keeping the Toshiba current. That is a con, but on the other side is the fact that the Toshiba could readily be supported by a third-party, so maintenance going forward had a tendency to be a little cheaper.

Quality of maintenance is always a concern. With a third-party, it's a larger concern. Eaton really took care of all my concerns early on with the quality of their maintenance. That was good since I couldn't go anywhere else for maintenance.

The fact that I'm now seeing some of their field engineering diminish in quality - and don't get me wrong, I've not experienced any impact, but I'm seeing that there's a risk - creates a concern because there is no third-party I can go to. Where, with Toshiba, if I don't like what's happening to a third-party maintenance vendor, I can go to another third-party maintenance vendor who's supporting Toshiba.

Before we chose Eaton, we evaluated other vendors, but we try to standardize. For us, it doesn't make sense to have two or three UPS vendors. Before we started replacing the old ones, we looked at APC and a couple of the other UPS vendors, along with Eaton. We thought that, for the overall product, Eaton supplied the best and we standardized on them.

The design of GE system was the biggest difference, specifically the maintenance bypass system. The way it was designed was very poor. In order to take the UPS off the system to do the main work for anything on it, you still have to have a blink on all your systems in order to do that. Whereas, the Eaton UPS has an ability to not blink, even though you bring it offline.

With the Eaton UPS, we are able to do the service work and not have to maintain them, but yet we can keep the systems up and operational. However, with the GE system, that was our first UPS that we put in. We realized quickly that we can't maintain them and keep the systems up and operating. We've had to do some other modifications just to be able to do maintenance to that unit.

I did a comparison when I did the first Eaton and they were by far, not just on footprint, but overall, the better product.

We compared APC, Liebert, and Xtreme.

We evaluated Schneider and Liebert. 

Elekta recommended this UPS and they set it up. We didn't really shop around because this was their solution.

We looked at Liebert, but we liked the Eaton better. They were comparable when it comes to cost. The difference was efficiencies.

We also evaluated Liebert, Schneider, and APC.

Liebert was a good alternative. Back when I started my career, we had a Liebert UPS in one of our data centers. It was very reliable. They were definitely a consideration. 

Part of what we looked at was Eaton service models in the area where we are located. They had plenty of technicians available. The product is made here in this area, so parts are readily available. 

There were quite a few reasons that we leaned toward Eaton, and it also had good recommendations from others.