An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This cannot be more true for data center maintenance. Effective maintenance strategies help protect your data center from unplanned outages, and reduce repairs and downtime related costs. Shutting down of data center can cost millions of dollars to big facilities.
For the maintenance of your data center to be effective, a comprehensive maintenance strategy must be in place. It includes the following:
Regular inspections
Your data center management staff can carry out the inspections, regular monitoring and checking for poor efficiency use and alarm alerts.
Predictive maintenance
This can be done via a monitoring system. Your onsite staff will monitor trends and measure specific data to predict the potential end of life equipment in the data center.
Corrective works
They help prevent imminent failure through timely procurement of end-of-life equipment and prompt faulty parts replacement.
Preventive maintenance
Equipment should get tested, cleaned, adjusted, and replaced through a planned maintenance schedule to ensure optimal performance at all times.
Preventive maintenance
One of the best ways to ensure minimal amount of equipment failures and shutdowns is to perform preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance conduct scheduled analyses to catch the defect before occurring. Having a plan in place and executing on it regularly will help avoid unplanned downtime due to battery failure, clogged air filters, and other physical causes which could lead to a crisis in critical infrastructure.
Amongst others, preventive maintenance should include checks on equipment such as switches and routers, circuit breakers, power supplies, cabling, HVAC systems, fire detection, and prevention systems.
Why is preventive maintenance important?
1. Reduces the risk of data center failure
There are high chances that your data center shuts down because of loads of data. That is why maintenance is crucial to avoid interruptions in data storage, access, and retrieval. Shutting down data centers does not only affect the accessibility of data but can also be very costly.
2. Management of operational costs
Preventive maintenance is not only about extending the lifespan of your data center but also managing operating costs. Data centers consume massive energy amounts. One way to lower operational costs is to make sure that your equipment works efficiently by solving or fixing issues in the system.
3. Preventing the risks of downtime
For data centers to keep running through unforeseeable power issues like utility spikes and power outages, most of them depend on the reliability of UPS or Uninterruptible Power Supply systems. Preventive maintenance must be in place to maximize the performance and reliability of the UPS systems by providing systematic detection and correction of failures.
4. Safety of people, equipment and facilties
Safety systems such as VESDA aspirating smoke detection (ASD) which enables early detection and mitigation of potential fire threats, must be regularly maintained for performance and reliability to avoid potential disasters which can cause injury, loss of life and equipment damage.
5. Reducing environmental impact
In the industry of data centers, sustainability must be a priority and should form an integral part of all development strategies moving forward. While the focus remains on green data center strategies, companies can strive to achieve a balance between reduced energy consumption and increased performance by prioritising preventive maintenance.
At GreenBay, we are able to assist you in your preventive maintenance measures. We have the skills and expertise to manage all the equipment that makes your critical infrastructure work. Our training and hands-on experience means that we know what to look out for, and how to handle the physical equipment and the system that runs it, as well as advise and guide you in your maintenance strategy. Get in touch with us today to make your maintenance routine work better for your data center and critical infrastructure.
