Exceptional Value

Data centre is the heart of any business and without an efficiently functioning data centre, a business can be put at a huge risk of down time and significant financial losses. Following are some statistics possibly due to poor maintenance of their data centres:

  • Average Fortune 1000 Company has nine computer crashes per year.
  • Such companies have reported an average loss of $3M per year due to crashes.
  • Average hourly revenue lost was between $78K & $500K.

The above should not apply to any company and can be avoided. Our Data Centre Auditing service will provide an independent assessment detailing current deficiencies of the environment and recommendations of improvement to achieve increase in efficiency, security and better operating environment. Some of the following main points will be covered, depending on the applications:

Causes

The efficiency of a data centre can be affected by the following items:

  • Design limitations.
  • Organic & new growth.
  • Ageing.
  • Sales to supply misalignment.
  • User abuse.
  • Service and maintenance deficiency.
  • Misunderstandings.
  • Misinformation.


Hidden Issues

There are numerous hidden issues that are often not considered:

  • Overloaded floor.
  • Unbalanced power.
  • Capacity & redundancy of systems & services.
  • Electrical protection.
  • Untested systems.
  • Switchboard terminations due to uncontrolled installation practices.
  • Absence of monitoring & reporting systems.
  • Single point of failures (SPOF).

Building Construction
  • Construction of the room.
  • Fire rating.
  • Location of the room.
  • Security of the room.
  • Access floor.
  • Floor condition.
  • Housekeeping.
 Mechanical Services
  • Single point of failures (SPOF).
  • Base design capacities.
  • Level of the environmental conditioning..
  • Design configuration and redundancy.
  • Plant and services security.
  • Life cycle 7 conditions.
  • Water detection.

Electrical Services

  • Single point of failures (SPOF).
  • Power supply and substations.
  • Power limitations.
  • UPS and associated power circuits.
  • Generator systems.
  • Surge protection.
  • Lightning protection.
  • Switchboard design & segregation.
  • Cable reticulation & supporting methods.
Fire Services
  • Single point of failures (SPOF).
  • Operational training.
  • Testing procedures.
  • Smoke detection.
  • Multi-point aspirating smoke detection systems.
  • Sprinkler systems.
  • Gas suppression systems.

Security
  • Single point of failures (SPOF).
  • Intruder detection.
  • Access control & monitoring.
  • CCTV systems.
  • In-house security management & control.
  • Compliances with computer vendor's requirements and specifications.
  • Risk assessment based on business exposure.
Environmental Monitoring
  • Level of computer room monitoring for alarms.
  • Installed systems and their suitability.
  • Procedures.
  • Training.

Management
  • Maintenance contracts/Service Level Agreements (SLA's).
  • Processes.
  • Planning.
  • Data collection.
  • Reporting systems & facilities.
  • Staff training.
  • Responses to incidents.