More Than a Blood-Pressure Test: How’s Your Data Center’s Health?

When people think “Data Center,” they think, “Technology.” They may not consider that the data center facility itself is the operational technology that keeps the IT assets within running reliably and profitably. Let’s consider the data center’s operational technology as the life-support for your business technology. The OT data provides you the vitals necessary to judge the overall health of your center.Is it working in the way you need for your team to run your best business? When determining if your operational technology is keeping your center healthy, consider these three aspects: Profitability, Reliability, and Scalability. These are some of the factors that help answer the question: How is your data center’s health?

Profitability

The profitability of your data center is the constant blood flow needed to keep your center running. Having a consistent and healthy data center will ensure profitability. Bottom line: your data center needs to run to make a profit. To see the profitability in your data center, it has to run efficiently.

To increase your data center’s profitability, it needs to have:

• Customer Relationship: You need to understand your customer’s business, demands, and goals. Using their operational data and knowledge of their business, provide the support they need to increase margins.
• Thorough Process: Processes must be in place to ensure your data center runs at full capacity 24x7x365. Clear and thorough processes will guarantee your team knows what to do and how to do it. Consider the alerts that will go off in your data center on any given day. Without a transparent process, the alarms will be dealt with differently and communicated inconsistently. Putting a thorough process in place ensures your team is working efficiently, allowing for higher profits.
• Data, Data, Data: The more real-time data you have, the better your decisions will be. Nobody wants to make decisions on inaccurate numbers. With a quality platform in place, you can collect data about how your equipment is running. The more accurate your data, the more opportunities to see where you can upsell clients for more server space.
• Reduced Downtime: If any maintenance needs to be done, it should require as little downtime as possible. The last thing you need is your system down for support. The less your network is down, the more opportunity you have to bring in profits. Have processes in place that will allow your teams to do maintenance with as little downtime as possible.

If at least one of these is not in place, you are leaving money on the table. Your OT might not be working for you. Consider where there are gaps in the processes you have in place. Is your team having to do more because of a disconnected plan? Additionally, your team may be working on old and inaccurate data. Data, at the core, is the information your decisions are based on. You don’t have room for decisions to be made on irrelevant data. Any of these problems can indicate a blood clot and a potential risk in your center’s profitability.

Reliability

When getting information from a doctor, you expect the data to be reliable and related to your concerns. Likewise, your OT needs to be reliable. No matter how many units you have, your OT should help you decide how to make your services run smoothly and efficiently. This includes making design decisions on power allocation based on empirical data. Your choices will be well informed with accurate data supporting it. If you provision for 70 units of power, but the customer is drawing 20, there are significant implications on how you load your circuits.

One of the ways Casne helps their clients is to complete an alarm rationalization exercise. During this process, they will group all of the alarms coming from all of the data center’s devices into severity categories. Then Casne integrates the alarms into the data center’s system. Then, depending on the type of alarm triggered, an email alert will be sent out from the data center’s system to the appropriate people. The notifications the teams are getting become 100% more reliable to their job and responsibilities.

Also, a reliable data center has clear processes put in place. If you have a plan for who should be contacted for specific alarms so that the best equipped to respond is getting the information, your OT is pushing you forward. If it’s not set up that way, then it’s another example of being held back from working efficiently.

Scalability

Your doctor doesn’t want you to have the bare minimum of healthy metrics. If long term health is the goal, then you can’t strive for the bare minimum. The same can be said for your data center. It’s not about kicking into neutral and coasting. Once you have a healthy system in place, it’s time to look for ways to scale your business. One of the challenges we see clients face is scaling their business while still maintaining their center’s current workflow. It’s essential to sustain availability while scaling. If your current system isn’t ready for scaling, then putting a standard in place for continued availability is where you should start.

One of the ways we help our clients prepare for scaling is by supporting them through upfront planning. With the initial investment of upfront planning, our clients can create standardization of design with built-in scaling concepts. The upfront planning support has helped our clients make choices that will benefit in the long run. One of our clients created a plan where equipment is reused during the scaling process. Additionally, they had put in procedures that would continue with the scaling. 

We have supported our clients by helping them better use their current business plan without scaling up. We have implemented energy management software to find stranded power, which has extended the timeline of our clients’ needs to scale. 

Our experience has taught us that clear processes and procedures make scaling a more natural process. It starts by having a robust template and living document of systems for the current business that prepares for future investment and scaling opportunities.

As you’ve seen, data centers’ profitability, reliability, and scalability are made possible by quality operational technology. Is it happening in your data center? To push your data center forward, look to the experts in operational technology: Casne Engineering. With over 40 years of success in professional engineering and technology integration services for critical facilities, our capable engineers and technologists develop and support engineered solutions using the best of breed products and technologies. Contact Mike (michail.clutter@casne.com) to discuss your data center’s energy management needs. We promise it will be a whole lot more fun than an annual check-up.