Good, but could be better

The RS 1500 with the optional battery pack is an elegant extended back-up solution for departmental servers or critical desktops and workstations, says Prashant L Rao

When you think of a server UPS, chances are words like ‘big’, ‘heavy’ and, perhaps even ‘massive’ enter your mind. The APC Back-UPS RS 1500 is an extended power back-up solution that bucks this trend by offering a slim tower unit. Along with its optional battery pack (identical in form factor to the UPS) it is a good extended power back-up solution for a departmental server or critical workstation. In this role it can provide about 50 minutes of back-up on its own and close to three hours and 45 minutes of back-up with the battery pack. We used a test bed of a single PC and a 1 CPU PC server and got similar back-up timings.

That said, the Back-UPS RS 1500 can also be used quite effectively as a power back-up solution for small workgroups of three to five PCs; particularly when it is deployed in conjunction with the optional battery pack. On it’s own, the unit just about cuts it for a small workgroup, offering 17 minutes of back-up in our tests with a load of three PCs. Add the battery pack and that shoots up to a whopping 69 minutes, which is very good indeed. Of course, it needs better software to fit this role. The RS 1500 will be a better workgroup solution if APC redesigns it to let you plug it into a network hub. Couple that with ‘agents’ on each PC in the workgroup and you’d be able to extend the ability to automatically shut down when the UPS is running out of power to all PCs on the workgroup.

The four power and single surge suppressor sockets are cleverly designed to give you five sockets at the back of the unit. There’s a circuit breaker to reset the UPS if something goes wrong. The usual phone line surge protection is available. It also comes with overload and replace battery indicators.

The product does not have an indicator that tells you when the optional battery pack is plugged in. Without an indicator you have no way of knowing that your power protection has just been quadrupled without actually switching off the mains and whipping out a stopwatch.

All said and done, this is a good solution for providing a second line of back-up to a critical server or workstation, beyond what’s provided by a common UPS for the entire department.

prashant@expresscomputeronline.com