Posted to News on 5th Jun 2013, 11:40
Eaton Delivers UPS Support for the Open Source Community
As part of its long-term commitment to supporting the open source software community, Eaton has provided power protection for the computing infrastructure of Debian, one of the world's most popular free operating systems. The Debian infrastructure is primarily hosted at two sites: Darmstadt, Germany, and Vienna, Austria. At no cost to Debian, Eaton has supplied new Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs) and power distribution equipment at both sites, which were brought into service in February 2013.
For the Darmstadt site, the new Eaton equipment comprises two 2kVA UPSs with hot-swap functionality plus a 3kVA extended battery module to provide extra runtime. These units are complemented by two Eaton ePDU enclosure-based Power Distribution Units (ePDUs) to facilitate power management. For the Vienna site, Eaton has supplied a single 2kVA UPS that will be used to power the core of the Debian internal development system.
The sponsoring of UPS systems for the Debian project is only one element of the support Eaton provides the open source community. Eaton has been an active Debian partner for the last 5 years and the main supporter of the Network UPS Tools (NUT) project since 2002. This project develops the NUT software package, which provides a uniform control and monitoring interface for power devices, such as UPSs, power distribution units and solar controllers from over 100 different manufacturers. To aid the NUT project, Eaton makes full information on its UPS protocols publicly available and is the only major power device manufacturer to do this. It also lends sample UPS units to developers working on NUT and related projects.
Arnaud Quette, Eaton Opensource Solutions Lead, NUT Project Leader and Debian Developer, says: "Not only do we at Eaton strongly back the principle of freely available open source software, we are also finding that our customers increasingly prefer to work with open source packages, especially with Linux and related systems. One of the main reasons for this is that open source packages offer an excellent solution to the problem of integrating hardware from different vendors."
In addition, the open source software is free, including leading packages from Debian and NUT, which are very well resourced and supported. It is estimated that if Debian were a commercial product, the development cost to date would have been around $19 billion. By supporting open source software, Eaton is helping to give its customers access to the benefits of this huge development effort.
Renaud Zigmann, CEO at xsalto, a French specialist technology company for software engineering, Internet and hosting services, comments: "About 90 per cent of our software is open source and most of our applications run on Debian. In our business reliability is crucial to our success and UPS technology plays a key role. Xsalto has been using Eaton equipment very successfully for over 10 years in its Debian environment.
"We truly appreciate Eaton being so open with its protocols and also providing active support for Debian and NUT. From our point of view, there really is no alternative to the NUT software today. Thanks to Eaton's commitment to open source, we benefit directly from the on-going developments in the NUT software, which allow us to continuously enhance the reliability of our Eaton UPS systems."
For more information on Debian and NUT, please visit www.debian.org and www.networkupstools.org. To learn more about Eaton's power distribution equipment and UPS products, visit www.eaton.eu/powerquality.
