Facility management is
about power, cooling and fire protection, and physical access controls. Managing
the space, power, cooling, installing equipment and conducting all change
management and configuration management has slowly become integrated and IT and
facilities management have to work together. But the
real issues are power and air conditioning. Air conditioning is the number one
consumer of power. Servers generate lot of heat and high density racks consume
lot of power, and a similar amount of power is needed to dissipate this heat.
That makes the planning and layout of the data center, and the provision of
power and air conditioning equipment, crucial.
Facility Management department
help design the layout of the racks to maximize the efficiency of the cooling
systems. With the help of software tools and packages facilities managers
manage the amount of power that must be supplied in a given area of data
center, and corresponding cooling capacity needed to remove the resulting heat.
Facility management software and tools are being developed that help in
efficient use of the power and cooling resources so as to reduce the cost and
avoid technical failures due to power and cooling failures.
Electrical Engineers, Power
cooling and Air conditioning specialists, Mechanical engineers with IT
knowledge and capable of handling dashboards and performance management
software are in high demand. As data centers are becoming bigger and bigger and
power consumption rising rapidly and development of power cooling systems and
technologies a new breed of engineers are in demand. Data centers are
being constructed in large numbers across the world and rapid explosion in data
and its storage, the demand for the engineers and cooling specialists with
specific skills are in high demand. Cable and networking equipment handling is
another skill that is required. Servers and storage devices have to be
connected and need to be maintained so as to avoid the failures that cost data
centers significantly.
Fire specialists are another critical area of data
center facilities management. Fire protection systems like sprinklers, smoke
detectors, and fire extinguishers are must for any data centers. For big data
centers fire protection and suppression systems requires the expertise of a
fire engineer to ensure the protection of property, continuity of business and
most importantly life safety in the data center are upheld.
Physical
security also plays a large role with data centers and access to the site is
usually restricted to selected personnel, with controls including bollards and mantraps.
Video camera surveillance and permanent security guards are always present if
the data center is large or contains sensitive information on any of the
systems within. The use of finger print recognition man traps is starting to be
commonplace.
Cleaning a data center is a delicate process that
requires the services of highly-trained professionals who know how to safely
handle mission critical equipment. Exterior Hardware Cleaning Tops of Floor Cleaning
and under floor Plenum Cleaning services are usually performed at scheduled
intervals, ranging from once per year to once a day. Data centers have to be
cleaned not only to protect the health of the employees but also protect the
hardware, software and other equipments from damage and repairs.
Some of the jobs require higher skills and some lower
skills in the data center facilities management. But the fact is both
facilities and IT teams have to work together for the efficient running of the
data centers. Communication between the two teams must be effective and they
should supplement each other constantly for the profitable running of the data
centers and smooth functioning.
