New Industry Products

American Power Conversion Expands Symmetra Power Array Line

November 13, 2000 by Jeff Shepard

American Power Conversion (APC, West Kingston, RI), has announced an expansion to its Symmetra Power Array line of fully scalable and redundant power-protection solutions. The new Symmetra rackmount, available in sizes ranging from 8kVA to 12kVA, is intended to safeguard mission-critical servers, networking and telecom equipment. One feature of the new unit is that it can be fully managed through an integrated Web/SNMP management card, allowing it to be easily integrated into a customer's present IT management strategy. Designed to protect single or multiple racks from power anomalies and outages, the new Symmetra unit occupies 15U of vertical rack space.

The Symmetra rackmount's architecture is similar to the design of redundant array of independent drives (RAID) technology that offers redundancy to each critical component of the system. This design consists of a rack-mount frame with slots that house both power and battery modules that share the load, as well as a main intelligence module and a redundant intelligent module so that if any single module fails, the others pick up the load and output power remains uninterrupted.

In an effort to reduce total installation time and costs, the new Symmetra rackmount ships with user-serviceable, hot-swappable, pre-installed modules. Additionally, when it becomes necessary to increase power capacity or runtime, additional modules can be added at any time.

"We've dramatically expanded our award-winning Symmetra Power Array family to provide users with a highly reliable, rack-optimized solution to meet their application needs," said Ed Bednarcik, general manager, Business Networks Group. "APC's high-availability solutions grow with the customer's network, helping them to maintain a stable and highly reliable power infrastructure."

APC's Symmetra RM will ship worldwide in the first quarter of 2001.