The modern data center is integral to our daily lives, from business operations to personal communication. Data center operators strive to operate at 99% uptime and need solutions that minimize downtime. Downtime is costly to the data center, but it can also damage its reputation and cause its clientele to experience threats to the safety of its business operations and employees.
Data center managers have the difficult task of improving resiliency while meeting company or governmental cost and energy efficiency targets. On top of those ambitious goals, the data center has to keep up with the increasing demand and capacity in a world where smart technology and connectivity to the IoT are being added to everything, right down to our coffee makers.
While each data center has unique requirements, and the design of each project will be meticulously analyzed and planned. Here are six ways that data centers can implement to improve their resiliency.
- Facility Data Center Infrastructure Management (fDCIM)
**Uptime Institute estimates that each minute of downtime costs $9,000**
Minimize downtime with fDCIM software that gathers data from operational systems and provides a single pane of glass to view energy use, inform preventative maintenance and optimize building operations. Albireo Energy has a proprietary diagnostic tool called BEYOND Analytics that provides actionable data analysis to improve the performance of data centers.
- Utility Compliance and Market Risk Assessment
**Achieve greater ROI even with unforeseen risks**
Find the blind spots in your energy practices. Utility data analysis of a data center or portfolio of data centers can reveal hidden energy consumption and costs. Reduce risk by defining market factors that affect costs and take control of outcomes. This can include buying renewable energy credits, utility bill management, and supply optimization with aggregate energy procurement.
- Sustainability
**Data Center Growth doesn’t have to come at the expense of our planet**
Reduce the carbon footprint of data centers with energy management, energy procurement plans that include renewables, and compliance with sustainability mandates by using strategic utility analysis and reducing costs.
Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy estimates that most data centers can slash greenhouse gas emissions by 88 percent by improving the energy efficiency of their equipment. Improving the efficiency of the IT devices accounts for 80 percent of those savings and will have the largest impact on CO2 emissions. Energy management is the easiest and cheapest way to reduce energy consumption, emissions and expense.
- Programmable Logic Controls (PLC)
**With PLCs, the average time between failures is measured in decades**
PLCs integrate with other devices and systems in the data center to perform tasks and provide fault detection. PLCs perform a scan cycle that consists of collecting data inputs, performing analysis, and executing a task or output based on the results.
Scan cycles take milliseconds and provide nearly instant real-time results. PLCs offer virtually limitless options that can be customized to the data center’s specific needs. PLCs are integral to reducing downtime.
- Electric Power Monitoring Systems (EPMS)
**Essentially any business that wants to improve resiliency should install an EPMS**
An EPMS collects energy consumption data and displays it in a comprehensible way. There are 3 components of an EPMS, a metering device, analytic software and a communications interface between the two.
An effective EPMS solution will provide data centers with more than energy consumption and waste data. EPMS have multiple benefits including fault diagnostics, trending data, advanced sequence of events recording and power quality analysis.
- Building Automation Systems (BAS)
**Uptime Institute estimates 88% of downtime is caused by human error**
The sophistication of building systems plus the energy code compliance requirements demand that data center managers have their finger on the pulse of their operation. Automating systems reduces the chances of error by programming settings so that equipment runs at optimum efficiency.
Installing an integrated BAS provides real-time monitoring of building temperatures, RH%, CO2, CO, N, occupancy and equipment status. A Single Pane of Glass (SPoG) displays data, alarms and schedules that can be monitored in person or remotely. BAS can simplify operations and maintenance of the data center providing personnel with meaningful data, fault detection alerts and scheduled tasks to reduce mistakes.
Albireo Energy has been providing innovative and custom solutions to data centers worldwide. Albireo’s smart solutions have optimized the performance and reliability of hyperscale, colocation and enterprise data centers in leading-edge operations. Albireo’s highly trained team has completed hundreds of projects using integrated, non-proprietary, successful solutions.
Since banking, shopping, manufacturing, advertising, healthcare, driving, home comfort, entertainment and virtually anything else you can name relies on the internet and therefore, data centers, the importance of excellent performance in data center facilities is immense. The technology is out there and strategies that benefit the data center, society and the environment are within reach.
The future is now, and data centers, large and small, should be optimizing their operations immediately.
