The uninterrupted power supply serves two crucial purposes: to protect equipment from voltage spikes and provide short-term power in an outage. How much time is need (ride through time) is often up for debate, and a minority even argue that data centers could be built without this critical element of power infrastructure. However with the cost of unplanned downtime on the rise as we all become more dependant on digital services, UPS is a frontline investment.

We ask our panel of experts about the next generation of UPS systems that will come to market (lithium, sodium, super-capacitors and the rest) and their relative merits for deployment in the data center, how older technologies can be phased out and what the implications are for resilience, sustainability and the bottom line.