Power Witness UPS Monitor for PICK
Missouri Botanical Garden
Priceless Scientific Data Protected by Power Witness UPS Monitor
At the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, 50 PhD's work to catalog
Earth's plant life. The facilities house over 4.5 million dried specimens and act
as a lending library for researchers in the US and abroad. Prized samples were
collected by Charles Darwin and Lewis & Clark.The Garden maintains a PICK database of scientific names and research data on
over 600,000 plants. The TROPICOS database is growing at the rate of 125,000
new entries per year and is accessible via Internet 24 hours a day.Two years ago, the Garden installed an RS/6000 to bring Internet to the PICK
doorstep. Today's challenge is to transfer some data-handling chores to INGRES
applications which will run alongside PICK and UNIX.According to Christine McMahon, head of Botanical Information Management, "The
RS/6000 is very powerful, but if you pull the plug it crumbles." That's why she
installed an uninterruptible power source (UPS) and Power Witness UPS Monitor to
safeguard the system and keep information flowing.Power Witness by Atkin/Jones is an intelligent, fault-tolerant UPS monitor that
initiates a controlled shutdown of PICK and UNIX applications in the event of a
power failure or environmental hazard.Power quality is a big issue in the midwest. Thunder storms often light up the
sky and wreak havoc with power and telephone lines. In the heartland, a UPS
is not an option - but by itself, a UPS just isn't enough."Power outages aren't predictable," says McMahon. "They usually happen at night,
and I live 45 minutes away. I don't want to have to worry about the system every
time I hear thunder."
"Just a few weeks ago," she continued, "lightening hit a transformer near the
Garden. The dial-up phone lines were knocked out, the lights were out, but the
system and the dedicated Internet lines were fine."Power Witness is essentially a PICK product designed to work with UNIX on a
variety of platforms. But from the beginning, it has included amacro-authoring
capability so users can adaptPower Witness protection to their unique operating
conditions.As she began to prototype INGRES applications on her system, McMahon contacted
Atkin/Jones for advice. They readily supported her efforts to develop an INGRES
shutdown procedure.According to Greg Atkin, "Our goal is to help Power Witness users add
functionality to their systems whenever possible, regardless of their development
environment. As they develop new applications to suit their needs, we are ready
to help them take full advantage of our product. Power Witness protects mission
critical data, not just hardware."Atkin/Jones is an independent computer service organization based in Santa Ana,
California. For over fifteen years, the firm has specialized in the
installation, maintenance, and support of PICK-based computer systems, plus a
select group of peripherals.Power Witnessis the first in a series of products to be released by Atkin/Jones
that will help reduce or eliminate power-related service problems. Power Witness
is available for use with RS/6000 and 386/486/Pentium PCs running PICK/UNIX
systems.