By Kevin O’Brien, President - Mission Critical Construction Services Division, EEC

With growing costs of energy in their facilities, energy conservation seems to be on the top of the priority list for many data center operators.  According to Datacenter Journal and other industry sources, today’s data centers consume approximately 3% of global electricity and produce 200 million metric tons of CO₂.  And with the imminent growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, social media and cloud computing, our reliance on these energy hogs shows no signs of subsiding.  While companies strategize new ways to reduce the astronomical cost required to power today’s data centers, they now also have to factor in a more long-term concern – their facilities’ impact on the environment.  One quick way to improve data center efficiency is through the optimization of environmental parameters, specifically Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) / Computer Room Air Handler (CRAH) units.

Originally posted on Data Center Post On August 28, 2014

Originally posted on Data Center Post On August 14, 2014

Your Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system needs to remain in peak operating condition in order to keep your critical facilitiy’s equipment protected during unplanned outages. The loss of any business critical systems can be staggering; therefore – facility and data center managers must perform regular UPS maintenance to make sure critical systems stay running in the chance of a sudden loss of power or voltage drop. In this article, we will talk about UPS maintenance, extending the life of your UPS batteries and capacitor replacement recommendations.

 I’m sure most, if not all of you, have heard about Amazon Web Services recent outages at their data centers – could any of these outages been helped by data center thermal imaging? The power, cooling and support systems are vital to the continuous flow of information in data centers and telecom facilities. If you had the ability to identify and resolve heat-related issues in your mission critical environment would you do it? Performing data center infrared thermography or thermal imaging predictive maintenance on your critical support infrastructure is a must and should be seriously considered in your regular data center maintenance schedule.

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 $505,000—surely that is something most data center managers cannot afford. Here is an excerpt from the article:

In this article, we will share some data center maintenance and efficiency best practices that will help data center facility managers keep your data centers up and running as well as helping to save energy and control costs.

Would like to share an article from The DataCenter Journal  that talks about diesel generator fuel cleaning and how critical it is in regards to data center maintenance and reducing downtime in your data center - here is the article:

There are a few important questions that facility and data center managers need to ask themselves to make sure they are on the right track in terms of timely and proper computer room air conditioning (CRAC) equipment maintenance; these include: What maintenance needs to be done on the equipment? When? How often?

Dirty fuel is a fact of life. Even with the development of cleaner burning fuels, contaminants are still a major concern when it comes to fuel systems. Micro-organisms can quickly become a major problem. Colonies of fungus and bacteria feed on your fuel.Commonly known as algae, they spread rapidly in the presence of moisture. They easily spread from one tank to another by riding in the fuel. As these micro-organisms accumulate, they will spread through your data center's generator fuel system and quickly plug the fuel filter. Most end users will simply add a biocide to kill the fungus. While this does kill the bacteria, it does not remove the growth media from the tank. Biocides are also very toxic and cause chemical burns when they come in contact with the human skin.