BSEE-SEP21-PG31 Mitsubishi_Layout 1 10/08/2021 20:07 Page 31


DATA MANAGEMENT, COMMUNICATIONS & SECURITY BSEE


Reliable data centres require preventative maintenance


Since the beginning of the pandemic, the way we work has changed fundamentally. Millions of employees have had to merge their home and office setups, and get used to working in a digital­first or digital­only way. In fact, Microsoft reported a 1,000% increase in the use of its Teams virtual meeting service in March 2020.


‘Freedom Day’ in July has brought about further easing of restrictions, and more businesses are beginning to welcome staff back to the physical office, but hybrid and flexible models will stay as the norm for many. This means a large portion of the population will still work remotely more than they did before the pandemic, and some businesses have even set out plans to go fully remote. Nationwide, VMware, and Pinterest, to name just a few, have all made the move to being remote-first organisations.


Despite living through huge change and uncertainty, for the past 15 months, we have been resilient and adapted quicky, both as individuals and as a society. In a similar way, the IT services that support the way we work have had to quickly adapt too, and have needed to be more resilient than ever. With disparate workforces, there is a greater need for data sharing – and the facilities that house this data must be relied on to keep businesses online.


Businesses are moving online


The massive upsurge in home working and the shift to online business means there is more demand than ever for service provision and increased bandwidth, and there is now a mind-boggling amount of data being shared in the Cloud.


Brian Beeston, Mitsubishi Electric Service & Maintenance Sales Manager


According to the latest data, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day, and it's only going to grow from there. In 2020, it was estimated that 1.7MB of data was created every second for every person on earth.


Businesses have been operating online instead of through face-to- face meetings and group working, which has made the use of data centres even more critical. Employees and teams must be able to share and access data to do their jobs – and the data centres that facilitate this simply cannot be allowed to fail.


Companies that had been relying on in-house data centres have also realised that the pressure was too high a risk (given the costs of outages and data loss) and switched to more substantial and more reliable providers offsite. This has subsequently increased the pressure on data centres to always work effectively.


Resilience is key for data centres


Data Centres have always needed to be resilient and reliable, and are designed with their own systems and mechanisms to ensure they can keep running at all times. The key element is that they have large amounts of cooling capability, and are able to keep the blade servers processing endlessly.


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Built-in back-up generators and cooling equipment are also designed to work 24 hours a day, and chillers stop computers from ever overheating and shutting down.


Put simply, these chillers are a mission-critical part of the whole process. As a result, it’s important to think about the resilience of the cooling equipment, because it’s not just their performance on day one of the operation that matters, they also need to continue delivering that same high level of


performance on every day and at all times of their life cycle. This is where the importance of a regular service and maintenance regime is so important.


Digital­first business needs preventative maintenance


The modern cooling equipment that is used in data centres today is highly advanced and able to modulate power consumption to match the cooling load at any given moment. This makes them very energy efficient, whilst ensuring they keep these critical data centres from overheating.


Because they are such


sophisticated pieces of equipment, they require a well-honed maintenance regime, and regular scheduled service visits. Planned and Preventative Maintenance is the bedrock of sustaining resilience in any Data Centre environment. Services like chiller diagnostic checks and run- performance help to ensure optimised performance and reduce wear and tear, and modern technology makes it possible to foresee the majority of potential issues through remote monitoring this is a more cost effective, faster way to carry out checks than to do it in-person.


The threats to the performance and integrity of the Data Centres are evident. By being pro-active in looking after the health of the critical systems, peak performance can be ensured.


Energy efficiency and cost reduction


Predictive and preventative maintenance can also bring both cost savings and energy reductions. It’s more costly to fix an issue once it occurs than it is to anticipate and prevent it happening.


This means that ongoing monitoring and analytics can help to reduce the cost of a cooling system over its lifetime, and make sure it works as reliably as possible.


If an IT cooling system is running at optimum efficiency, it can also help to reduce a building’s overall running costs. Preventative maintenance can help a system to work more efficiently and make it less likely that a short-term fix will be needed to replace a system before extracting maximum operational value from it.


Focus on prevention, not the cure


The pandemic has provided a clear example of how rolling out preventative measures can ensure human resilience is sustained - the development of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccines is an encouraging step towards being able to mitigate or even prevent any further impact caused by the disease.


There are other examples of effective preventative measures that we see every day. We are all familiar with the threats posed by computer viruses, so we utilise software to protect our devices and stop their negative impact.


Data Centres and their essential cooling systems are very similar. They need to take the same approach to ensure their ‘health’ and resilience is maintained too.


Just before the pandemic hit, research found that 40% of companies expected to be cloud- only by 2021, and that figure has no doubt increased as COVID-19 has forced millions of companies to work remotely.


As the long-established phrase goes; Prevention is better than cure. Ensuring reliability and resilience for the data centres that support businesses to operate in this way is a clear example of where this rings true – both in the current turbulent times and beyond…


BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER SEPTEMBER 2021 31


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