you mean the way we have this terrible problem with illegal importation to avoid heavy taxes on, say, cigarettes?

You meant to say "several other US states", right?

I think it's cute how Canada pretends it's another country and all...with the cute little money, and the whole maple leaf thingy...but let's face it: if they really were a different country, they'd look different, be less understandable, and we'd be building a wall between us.

Silly folks from Canadia!

Unless your servers themselves are redundant, you'd be better off with one large UPS with an external battery cage/frame. You can often find those for sale used, but you will almost always need to replace any batteries that come with them. Buy units that use commodity batteries - you can shop around for price among battery specialty shops - often there are substantial savings available. By having an external battery box, you can add battery strings in the future to increase backup time as needed. Having more than one string (if it's wired correctly) also means you can take one string off-line for testing but still have some backup. There are some bigger units that are rack-mountable if this is in a CoLoc, but I think they offer less bang/buck than other units I've seen.

The MTTF of the bigger UPS systems is typically longer than the individual smaller UPS units (not to mention the the effective MTTF of the smaller units is reduced if any one of them failing brings down your whole application), and the bigger ones usually have much better ways to do maintenance on them without taking your AC down (such as bypass switches, which could be available for smaller systems but would have to be wired for each one, which doesn't ever happen).

Next, if you buy a system that is fairly common, you should plan (by leaving space, etc.) to buy another one just like it some day. Then you can do a "Red/Blue" power setup, where all of your key gear has dual power supplies, with one plugged into each of the different UPS systems.

Eventually, batteries run out. And eventually, you will go down long enough that some VIP will recommend buying a generator. Generators are also best purchased used. I used to like the idea of natural gas powered generators - in a true emergency, it can be hard to get fuel deliveries for diesel generators. However, I found that in many areas the natural gas pressure depends on a functioning electrical power grid to keep the pump stations running - so I'd go with diesel power and make sure I had a contract in place that guaranteed fuel delivery even in case every generator owner in town was screaming for diesel.

I wouldn't mess with small gas powered generators - they aren't reliable enough to be worth it.

And finally, whatever you get, make sure you have a process in place that tests the functionality, and a way to make sure that if the tests fail that in is obvious and can get fixed. I can't tell you how many times I have seen backup systems fail, and as it turned out it had been failing weekly tests for a month previously, but the e-mail account that notification went to (or cell-phone number, or whatever) was no longer monitored. Embarrassing.

You are right. Conduit is key. There is no way you can realistically future-proof you're wiring.

You can, however, make paths so that when you decide you need cat"x", coax, speaker wire, fiber, or whatever, you can run it without getting out a saw, spackle, and a putty knife.

If you are on this site, you'd rather run cable than patch drywall, eh?

~T