Latest maintenance publications

Innovation is central to data centre evolution. The focus, however, tends to be on the latest hardware products rather than maintenance.

But what about day-to-day maintenance and management—those “keeping the lights on” functions that can eat up 80 percent of IT spending? Can they be modernised, optimised, and enhanced with new technologies and approaches?

Architects have always been an important stakeholder during the transition from the design phase to the building phase of data centres, where they help translate a client’s brief (including floor plan, security, space planning and maintenance access for cooling and power requirements) into detailed design documents. However, they have seldom been asked for their opinions on the requirements themselves. But as data centres become ever more complex and the pressure to cut costs mounts, the creative mind of the architect is increasingly being called upon.

The Uptime Institute espouses its tiering structure to describe a data centre’s physical resilience; however, this is a rather narrow scope when considering ‘availability’.

Building a resilient, highly-available data centre is only the initial, embryonic phase of its lifetime. For the following 15-20 years, how one operates and maintains a data centre is far more important than how it was built (that said, it does need to be built right in order to be operated to its maximum potential).