Facilities Manager - Friend or Foe?

In the computer rooms and data centres that we visit there is invariably friction, to say to the least, between the IT department and the Facilities department. IT don’t want to allow access to ‘their’ computer rooms, and facilities need access to maintain the plant.

These frictions need to be overcome. Facilities do need access to the computer room, and this should be allowed in a controlled manner, and if necessary, accompanied by a member of the IT team. Don’t forget however, that access could be required 24/7.

Ideally the computer room or data centre should be built with Facilities in mind. Putting the chillers in corridors outside of the room means that they can be worked on without the need for anyone to access the secure rooms. The environmental monitoring system should be linked to the in-house BMS – usually within the Facilities team’s domain. There is no reason however, why access shouldn’t be given to the data collected by it or to be on the list of people to be paged, emailed and/or sent a text message in the event of an alarm. Indeed, this can be beneficial to everyone as the IT Ops team are often required to work 24 hour shifts.

As I will be discussing tomorrow, metering should be installed in any computer room to allow for the calculation of PUE and DCiE, and to allow for ‘charge back’ to encourage everyone within the business to reduce energy costs. Facilities charge IT for the energy used, IT charge their customers in some way - whether by application, U space, or some other metric.

Building strong working relationships between these business critical teams is imperative. With modern IT infrastructure, cooling and power requirements, IT and facilities will have to work closer together. Migration Solutions specialises in designing data centres and computer rooms for operation. We understand how to operate a well run facility.

For more information see our website at www.migrationsolutions.com or email us at info@migrationsolutions.com

Saving on Servers

The market research company Gartner (www.gartner.com) has just released the latest figures detailing how the big IT companies are doing in these financially turbulent times. Compared to last year, Dell has seen a fall of 11.2% in revenue from server sales indicating that IT budgets have been slashed as companies tighten their belts. IBM appears to have fared worse with a fall of 17.4% in their server sales revenue. As a whole the market has fallen 15% which has had a direct impact on the share prices of these companies, falling between $20-30 in the last 6 months.

In the average data centre, large server purchases have been put on hold until the economy recovers and until companies have more money to invest. The result of this has been that IT staff have been looking for extra space on existing servers, consolidating servers with low activity to free up servers for other uses and thinking about virtualisation. Running a server at 20-30% load does not give value for money from the purchase. It will not fully utilise the multi-core processors and will use comparitively more power per megabyte of information processed than if it was running at 80-100% load. Placing applications like payroll and accounts which only get run monthly or annually and do not clash on the same server, reduces the idle time and increases efficiency.

By consolidating servers you will increase the amount of free rack space and reduce the load on the air conditioning. When these power cost savings are combined with the reduction in the purchasing costs of new equipment large savings can be made.

Migration Solutions specialise in providing vendor independent advise of the design and operation of data centres enabling the optimum return of investment. For further information visit www.migrationsolutions.com.