Providing Fail Safe Redundancy to Single Corded Devices

One of the largest printers in North America was looking to add redundancy to their critical single-corded devices after experiencing multiple power failures and downtime. The company began researching Fail Safe Transfer Switches (FSTS) to find the best solution. 

This company had two specific features that they were looking for: 1) the transfer of a power source from A to B or B to A, and 2) remote management of outlets. 

Three companies' products, including Server Technology, were evaluated and after much testing, Server Technology's FSTS was chosen.

So what made Server Technology's FSTS stand out from the rest?  To start, the ability to add two temperature and humidity probes for environmental monitoring was a major plus.   As environmental conditions can be viewed via the network interface.  Also, for the 16 outlet models chosen (PTXL-HF16-2-02 and PTXL-HF16-1-02), half of the outlets (8) are routinely powered by the A in-feed and half are powered by the B in-feed.  However, if the A in-feed goes down, the B in-feed powers all 16 outlets and the same if the B in-feed goes down.  The transfer occurs in fewer than 18 milliseconds, ensuring that the connected devices remain powered.  This "Fail-Safe" method has several advantages compared to a standard automatic transfer switch (ATS) because it does not prohibit load balancing between the two supplied circuits. A standard ATS contains two-in-feeds, but runs all outlets from just one source, with the secondary source only being used once an outage occurs. This results in less heat, less resistance, and consequently less of a voltage drop compared to the same load existing on just one source. Only when an outage occurs on one of the two sources will the entire load be applied to a single source.  Also, the PTXL series of FSTS provides for outlet switching via the network interface and allows for outlet state to be set to on, off, or reboot.

Since installing the Server Technology FSTSs, the customer has stated that he now has piece of mind knowing that if power goes down his single corded devices will remain up.  They enjoy that they can now reboot devices that have become unresponsive, and the environmental probes are providing them with email alerts or SNMP trap notifications when conditions exceed their defined thresholds.

Server Technology's sales support, before, during, and after the sale was also a helpful factor that played a role in the purchase.  Server Technology only focuses on one thing, power distribution, and it is for that reason that our Fail Safe Transfer Switches are the highest quality and meet the rigorous demands of data center managers.