We’re a resilient lot humanity, aren’t we?
If you look back over the last year at the change that we have all had to go through, as individuals and family groups as well as the whole of society, on both a local and a global scale, the most striking thing for me is how we have managed to adapt and survive.
Resilience is described in the dictionary as “the ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, etc.”
Resilience is a fundamental necessity to survive.
At the other end of the scale you have the opposite to it; Vulnerability. By eradicating any vulnerability, survival is extremely likely.
PPM is the bedrock of sustaining resilience in any Data Centre
Brian Beetson National Sales Manager for Service & Maintenance.
Society’s changing needs
One of the biggest changes has been to the working day and we have all had to get used to our office now being part of our home.
Home working is now a well-established and track proven practice around the world.
There has been a massive upsurge in home working and in the “online” business culture. This demands huge upsizing of service provision, increased bandwidth and a mind-boggling amount of data now being shared in the clouds.
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.
This move to online business, replacing face-to-face, makes the use of data centres even more critical and they simply cannot be allowed fail.
Resilient IT
Data Centres have their own systems and mechanisms to ensure resilience. The key element being large amounts of cooling capability, keeping the blade servers processing endlessly.
Data centres are built to be resilient with back-up generators and cooling equipment designed to work reliably 24 hours a day, with these chillers stopping the computers from overheating and shutting down, so they are a mission-critical part of the whole process.
This is where the resilience of the cooling equipment needs to be taken into account because it’s not just their performance on day one of the operation, they also need to continue delivering that level of performance on day 21 and 81 and 361. From day one and every day throughout to year 10 and beyond.
And this is where the importance of a regular service and maintenance regime is so important.
Preventative Maintenance for the digital world
Today’s modern cooling equipment 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.
They, like the blade servers they keep cool, are sophisticated pieces of equipment. This requires 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. Chiller diagnostic checks, run-performance evaluation both in combination with inverter technology, all promote optimised performance and reduce wear and tear.
The threats to the performance and integrity of the Data Centres are clearly evident. By being pro-active, in looking after the health of the critical systems will ensure it can perform to the peak of its capabilities.
Survival
In the midst of the challenging times we face with COVID-19 pandemic we are now on the verge of rolling-out a preventative measure to ensure human resilience is sustained.
With the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccines we are hopeful of mitigating or even preventing any further impact.
The modern world is also familiar with the threats posed by PC-viruses and we all regularly utilise software to prevent their negative impact.
Data Centres and their essential cooling systems are just the same and need the same approach to secure their “machine-health” and maintain their resilience.
At Mitsubishi Electric, we see our mission as providing reliability and resilience through our managed services to help organisations, people and society continue to ‘’survive’’ in these turbulent times.
As the long established phrase goes; Prevention is better than cure….
Brian Beetson is National Sales Manager for Service & Maintenance.
