Herbal Medicine Producer Bionorica Chooses a Huawei UPS to Secure the Power Supply Critical to Its Research
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Bionorica, today the world's leading manufacturer of herbal medicines, traces its roots to a one-man company founded in Germany in 1933. In essence, the company unlocks the huge potential of active ingredients found in herbs and plants, using cutting-edge research and innovative technologies to produce effective and safe herbal medicines.
Bionorica's research facility has been located in Innsbruck, Austria, since 2005. In 2008, the laboratory was expanded, with the introduction of large-scale equipment such as a new generation of highly sensitive mass spectrometers: powerful analytical tools for high-throughput testing environments. With such equipment in place, the laboratory is, of course, reliant on a constant, dependable power supply: even slight power fluctuations can have drastic effects on research, potentially ruining results and seeing intense effort go to waste. An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) must, therefore, guarantee high availability at any time, under any circumstance.
With its legacy UPS solution no longer state-of-the-art, Bionorica had three main areas of concern: reliability, maintainability, and scalability. "Due to the expansion of our research facilities, we reached the limits of our legacy infrastructure. So, after years of operations, it was time to renovate," said Laszlo Csonka, Executive Technician for Devices and Infrastructure at Bionorica. The size of any new UPS solution was important, since the Bionorica team didn't want it to take up too much space in the research facility — space that could be put to better use housing scientific equipment. A new, better solution was needed, one that could also meet increased capacity demands.
In essence, Bionorica decided to upgrade its UPS solution to better support future-oriented research. Huawei's certified partner, KESS Power Solutions, chose Huawei UPS5000-E, given its modular design and compact size, a precise fit for Bionorica's requirements.
As a long-term partner, richly experienced in deploying UPS solutions, KESS supported Bionorica throughout the upgrade. The Huawei UPS solution offers more power and higher availability than other options. It's also future-proofed: UPS5000-E is modular, with 50 kW/50 kVA modules and a 200 kW system cabinet allowing for easy expansion as requirements grow. Indeed, with the maximum capacity of a single-node system flexibly expandable to 800 kVA, initial investment costs can be substantially reduced.
With an optimized project timeline, it was possible to migrate to the new UPS in a single step, with installation taking just two days. KESS dismantled, removed, and recycled the old system, and new equipment was simply deployed. Single modules were easy to transport to the installation site, with the overall system meeting space and weight requirements, leaving more space to be put into productive, profitable scientific use.
"When dimensioning, KESS took our system-specific load profile into account. This means that the really critical connections are assured," Csonka said.
Maintenance for its new UPS was also key for Bionorica, which expected uninterrupted operations even during service work. The solution's modular, hot-swappable design simplifies Operations and Maintenance (O&M), reducing maintenance time to just 5 minutes and greatly improving system availability. The Huawei UPS helps avoid the most common types of interruption to power supply, too, cutting out disruptions to laboratory operations.
"The Huawei UPS is equipped with a redundancy module, which means high availability. With expansion achieved simply by adding modules, we are already prepared for upcoming upgrades. This redundantly designed UPS solution offers the exacting security and scalability that Bionorica needs for its research projects," said Georg Frühwirth, Head of Sales at KESS.
Careful selection of a UPS solution leads to stronger infrastructure, supporting the continuity of research through a high level of reliability and saving the costs associated with downtime. Day or night, the Huawei UPS solution continues to provide power to critical equipment, boosting the performance of research and, ultimately, the quality of the end product: healing herbal medicines.