Honeywell Building Technologies

Data centers play an ever-increasing role in keeping the global economy productive while closer to home.They support working remotely, shopping online and playing video games. Demand for data storage, transfer and processing is insatiable worldwide, which makes it more challenging than ever to run and scale these facilities effectively from a design, build and operations perspective. According to a 2021 Honeywell report, 70 percent of surveyed data center managers struggle to keep up with growing capacity needs, while 91 percent had experienced at least one downtime incident during the previous 12 months. 

As of April 2022, hyperscale providers planned to build 314 new facilities.This rapid expansion is forcing managers of existing data centers to do more with less which means improvingefficiency, reducingoperating costs and minimizing energy consumption. They need tools that automate as many processes as possible to help them meet these growing demands.

Given the massive proliferation of facilities being planned and built, operators must also address the fact that data centers use significant amounts of energy. In fact, they consume about 3 percent of the world’s electricity and produce 2 percent of global carbon emissions—about the same carbon footprint as the entire airline industry creates. These numbers are only expected to grow, which makes it crucial for data centers to invest in energyefficient technologies.

A holistic platform yields actionable insights, eases operator workload

With the rise of cloud computing, data centers are adapting and evolving. Anew generation of cloud-enabled management platforms can holistically integrate operational technology (OT) data with data from IT assets to improve operators’ situational awareness.By digitalizing and aggregating information from these disparate systems into a unified data lake and applying powerful analytics, these platforms can provide insights that help operators protect uptime, reduce energy use and increase efficiency. Automated data analysis also helps operators diagnose alarms and root causes, execute workflows to triage situations and improve response times. Additionally, a solution with a user-centric design can help support worker productivity.

It can monitor fleetwide performance as well as individual sites

With such a platform, managers can also integrate software that lets them monitor a global portfolio of data centers. This allows easy navigation from a single site-level to a fleet-level view, generating a KPI-based score for each site that reports uptime, effectiveness of power, carbon and water usage, space and capacity utilization, and energy consumption. It can also be used to generate logs and reports for the leadership team to keep them updated on fleetwide and individual site performance.

It can use predictive maintenance to improvereliability

Data centers require uninterruptible power and failsafe cooling. To improve reliabilityin these vital systems, managers can integrate predictive maintenance software into their platform to detect early signs of incipient problems. This process automation can help reduce the chance for human error, which caused major outages over the last three years among 40 percent of organizations surveyed by the Uptime Institute. Advanced fault-detection analytics provides real-time intelligence on asset performance, pre-failure alerts, and benchmarks for zone temperature, asset availability and energy consumption.

The data center industry is growing at a record rate, with the market projected to increase by at least 10 percent from 2021 to 2030. A holisticmanagement platform allows operators to derive actionable insights securely from their own data to help protect uptime, manage maintenance, reduce energy use and achieve scaling agility. If they are toeffectively minimize downtime, cut operating costs and meet sustainability goals, operators need to have the most advanced technology available.