One of the biggest areas of contention when it comes to data centres, is ‘who looks after it?’ – is it Estates, the IT department, or somebody else entirely?
In reality, this doesn’t matter; what does matter is that maintenance is done properly and that a Data Centre Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) schedule is created to ensure operational uptime and efficiency is optimised throughout the life of the data centre.
My good friend Scott Roots from Uptime Institute helped me with some interesting data, that emphasises the importance of Planned Preventative Maintenance in data centres:
Poor, or no, data centre maintenance is one of the main causes of unplanned downtime for businesses. If a business cannot operate for an extended time, the financial impact of a data centre outage on a business is somewhere between £100,000 to £1 million, in both direct and indirect costs.
It is estimated around 45% of data centre failures could have been avoided if Planned Preventative Maintenance had been implemented.
Regular data centre maintenance is an essential part of data centre operations. When deploying a data centre, ongoing care should be as essential as the deployment, and not an afterthought once constructed.
Even if you have a legacy data centre, you should still implement Planned Preventative Maintenance to ensure an older facility still operates as originally designed.
In fact, the older a data centre becomes, the more important the maintenance becomes as critical equipment ages and approaches the end of reliable life. In short, a well-planned and proactive data centre maintenance schedule is essential to keep any data centre operating efficiently and effectively.
What are the benefits of Planned Preventative Maintenance?
These are listed below:
- PPM will ensure any new equipment maintains its warranty status.
- Prevent small problems from escalating into larger issues or outages.
- Maximised equipment lifecycle and reliability and make the best possible use of the capital deployed.
- Improve energy efficiency and operating expenditure.
- Ensure that the data centre continues to operate as originally designed.
- Keep up to date with the latest software and firmware updates, systems technology, and emerging data centre best practices.
- Better sleep at night.
While I joke about better sleep at night, Future-tech maintains over 100 data centres across England, Ireland, and Scotland, with the purpose of ensuring our client’s data centres operate at peak performance according to their original design parameters.
A Data Centre is a complex thing and is generally built to provide reliability and resilience for business operations, so it is essential that it operates correctly in order to properly support business-critical services.
Do you have the experienced electrical and mechanical engineers required to run a data centre, and do you want to directly take on the business risk of managing a data centre without the correct skills and experience?
The purpose of Planned Preventative Maintenance is to catch small problems early and avoid them escalating into much bigger ones; while ensuring that if an issue does occur it is resolved quickly, efficiently and by Data Centre qualified engineers.
If you are not already doing this, contact Future-tech; we will help you find a suitable solution to ensure that you do not suffer unexpected downtime in your data centre.
Next in the series ( next week / Month / Year ): Equipment-Specific Maintenance