Do you keep up with your batteries? I usually don’t even think about that. However, a recent power outage got me thinking about batteries which if they are not kept up may result in more than an inconvenience.
Laptop batteries are the ones of which I am usually more aware. I use my laptop away from my desk a lot so I notice when the batter is discharged and when the life of a charge diminishes so the batter needs replacement. However, we have a number of other batteries that are more integral to our systems.
UPS Batteries are ones that we tend to pay more attention to. They are in front of us frequently. Many companies simply replace them on a schedule rather than waiting for failure.
There are a couple other batteries that are not so visible that may need to be added to your maintenance schedule.
Most computers have an internal battery to keep the clock running, and save simple settings. This battery makes it so that you don’t have to reset the date and time everytime you start your computer. These batteries have a long life.
Laptops, desktops and servers all may have an internal batter that may die and need to be replaced. This is becoming more the case as lifecycles increase. My five year old laptop with an I5 processor is still plenty powerful and is still useful for a lot of work. But who knows how long the internal battery may last?
Another battery that is not in most computers is in a caching disk controller. In order to speed up reads and writes from and to physical disks a caching controller will save data in memory and cache data using lazy/reads or writes based on predicted needs. Caching reads is not really a problem if the server power is lost, because the consumer is not going to be able to perform any additional activity. However, when writing to disk, if the battery on the caching controller is dead, the computer may lose data that was in the process of being written to disk during a power loss when the computer is not shut down cleanly. You can find caching controllers on servers, direct attached disk controllers, or even on your SAN. Be sure to maintain these batteries as well.
Perhaps this is a nice reminder for you to include in your maintenance schedule the batteries that are important to keep things running smoothly with less disruption or data loss.
Cheers,
Ben