Operations & Maintenance

Uptime, availability and sustainability drive boardroom goals and KPIs. However, many data center facility teams lack the data, processes and tools to measure and tie their performance to corporate strategic objectives and customer service level agreements. For companies who design, build, operate and maintain data centers, W. Edwards Deming's quote from his book The New Economics rings true, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." This is especially relevant for many "hyperscalers" who have been focused on keeping up with growing customer demand. 

 
The Bigger Picture 

Data center operational success rates hinge on implementing asset management solutions that correctly predict the condition and performance of a facility's infrastructure. This is to maximize availability and provide the reporting, autonomous actions and user dashboard features to support asset performance, reliability and sustainability goals. 

The growth of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is one of many challenges to current data center operations and infrastructure. Forecasts for 2028 data center power consumption is close to 4,250 megawatts, an increase of 212 times over current levels.   

At the same time, data center server infrastructure, plus operating costs, will exceed US$76 billion. This cost is estimated to be more than twice the annual operating cost of Amazon Web Services (AWS) – which currently holds one-third of the world’s cloud infrastructure services market, according to Trias Research.  

How can companies compete and thrive in this market? The answer requires securing the energy necessary to meet the demand, but equally, it necessitates optimizing data center operations to function with a strategy of sustainability. This comes in the form of consuming energy conservatively and in a manner that contributes to a higher corporate social responsibility (CSR) score. 

Success rate relies on three key strategies:  

 
Lead with a Strong Foundation Using Asset Performance Management 

Optimizing data center operations commences with building a strong foundation – and that starts with managing the performance of your facility assets.  

A sound and robust enterprise asset management (EAM) solution will extend the life of data center assets using sensors, predictive digital analysis and ideal planning, alongside replacement to gather insight into the condition and performance of the asset. It will also respond to weaknesses or malfunctions and prolong the life of the asset through proactive and predictive maintenance best practices.  

This foundational layer is critical for managing individual assets over their expected mission time and doing the right maintenance at the right time to form a well-defined maintenance plan.  

Finally, this information needs to be recorded, categorized and made available to all stakeholders through customized dashboards that deliver the most useful information to each stakeholder.   

 
Steps to Achieve Success 

The first step in maximizing asset lifecycle value is to use an asset performance management (APM) strategy, which provides the analytical engine for decision-making support, so you can have clear visibility into the risk, cost and performance and availability of assets.  

To strategically optimize data center operations, the EAM – as an installed or SaaS solution – must be reliability-centered and focused on the asset.  

Maximizing a data center's availability of the electrical, cooling and air handling systems requires the implementation of a two-prong strategy: eliminating known paths to asset failure and enacting protections to mitigate the risk of unknown failures. These protections can be activity-based, condition-based or pattern-based.    

Part of the strategy includes connecting to real-time data feeds and continuously monitoring the asset's condition relative to a model of expected behavior. Optimization comes when the solution builds its maintenance activities through the lens of reliability and how best to maintain assets over their lifecycle. 

Ultimately, by monitoring and optimizing the strategy over time and in line with the actual asset's behavior compared to the model, and implementing robust protections to mitigate risk, clients gain a comprehensive understanding of their assets as a risk-informed portfolio.   It also allows decision-makers to plan their outcomes around risk-performance and risk-cost trade-offs by correlating and integrating condition-based data sources so that insights are clear and actionable. 

Best practice strategies integrate siloed condition-based data sources around an asset to provide a single-pane-of-glass view into the data center's assets, condition and behavior so that the availability of each asset is maximized across its lifecycle. The ideal solution will maximize asset lifecycle value by continually inquiring how the assets are generating and delivering value to each layer in an organization and across their lifecycles. This enables long-term strategic decision-support to help with capital investment planning and resource allocation. 

There are four checklist items that confirm your EAM solution's success: 

 
Reliability-Centered Maintenance That Is Optimized 24/7 

Once a foundation has been built, the second critical strategy for optimizing data center operations includes building a plan to keep the data center fully operational by carrying out reliability-centered maintenance. This means your data center is reliable, available and optimized 24/7.  

Mission-critical facilities never sleep. A trusted solutions partner is going to invest in the client's success with consultative-style engagement services where a subject matter expert (SME) team will transfer their practical workplace knowledge to your company's personnel. SMEs need to gather in the early phase of implementation to review and optimize data center performance and availability by arranging early warning signals of failure using predictive analytics to ensure the client's team starts strong.  

Choose a solution that empowers your team and its priorities with cutting-edge technology to digitally transform your approach to facility continuity, heightened performance, productivity and utilization to seamlessly strengthen and secure operations for around-the-clock reliability. A worldclass EAM solutions team will maximize your asset lifecycle value by building a Smart Digital Reality™ with a layered solution that balances the continuum of digital projects and digital assets on a spectrum that meets the needs of your data center, every step of the way. This step is critical to optimizing data center operations. When an organization embraces a reliability-centered maintenance strategy, it increases the uptime and reduces costly downtime events from an offline data center. This is where the urgency of vast access to electricity and power takes a front seat in the overall performance of the facility infrastructure.  

Current technology helps secure a reliable power supply for data centers by preventing universal power supply failure to avoid all computers going down and taking the data center offline.   

Part of this includes supporting all forms of RCM content, to identify and mitigate data center failure risk consequences, and providing a comprehensive audit trail on all activities performed using RCM methods.  

 
Prioritizing Sustainability That's Visible to All 

Supporting sustainability is top of mind for most large corporations on their journey to optimize data center operations. Data centers require vast amounts of energy, and that is rising daily with increased reliance on artificial intelligence. Finding smart ways to operate with energy efficiency, manage waste responsibly and optimize resources, reduces an organization's carbon footprint and increases your CSR score. Data center sustainability is at the core of this initiative for many large corporations.  

Aside from most boardrooms expressing a desire to reduce their carbon footprint and make the world a cleaner, more sustainable place, a CSR score impacts your reputation and public stock. America’s Most Responsible Companies 2024 list ranks 600 of the largest corporations in the U.S., with a focus on specific KPIs, such as reducing emissions, optimizing energy consumption, and promoting diversity in management and board positions, according to Michael Bausch, a Senior Analyst at Statista.   

“There is a discernible trend where an increasing number of companies are not only engaging in CSR practices but also actively publishing CSR reports,” says Bausch.  

The most significant value of optimizing energy consumption and reducing emissions is returned to the corporations making this investment. While the amount of energy that data centers consume can impact global climate goals in the world's top 1% largest corporations, using technology to bridge reliability and sustainability benefits the companies making this investment the most. In a connected, technology-driven world, the increase in computer processing needs will soon draw more energy from the grid than the grid can support. Energy sourcing is a huge issue for data centers, which makes achieving and reporting sustainability a key initiative for growing organizations.