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You Can't Afford to Ignore Data Center Maintenance

Written by Kim Otte | Jul 9, 2012

We want to share a great article from The Data Center Journal regarding Data Center Maintenance and how critical it is in keep your facility up and running. It points out that lack of data center maintenance is the root cause of anywhere from a third to a half of downtime
events in the data center. It also mentions the 2011 study of data center managers conducted by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Emerson Network Power: This study shows that on average the cost of data center downtime was approximately $5,600 per
minute, and the survey's average reported incident length of 90 minutes makes the average cost of a single downtime event to be approximately $505,000surely that is something most data center managers cannot afford. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Maintenance in its broadest form (including capacity and performance) should be in [a data center manager’s] top three activities.” In other words, it should be a high priority. To be sure, data center managers face a number of challenges, ranging from reconciling the demands of management and facilities personnel to planning and overseeingequipment upgrades and day-to-day operations. Despite all these duties, however, maintenance is one task that should not suffer—and with a well thought-out strategy with scheduled maintenance tasks, it need not suffer. Kissell broadly identified the areas data center managers should focus on in planning for and performing maintenance

  1. Batteries
  2. UPS Systems
  3. Power generators
  4. HVAC infrastructure
  5. Switchgear, circuit breakers, ATS and PDU
  6. Periodic performance of IR scans


We recommend you take a look at the article for more great data center maintenance information as well as some of the blog posts and webinars we have posted for a more in depth look at why you need data center maintenance. Here are links to some of the blog posts that talk about data center maintenance:            

Electronic Environments has been maintaining data center's for over 25 years. Would you like to learn more about maintaining the life of your data center?