Data Center Skills – Facility Management

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.