Helping to optimise data centre uptime and productivity

Honeywell has launched its Data Center Suite, a portfolio of outcome-based software solutions that help data centre managers and owners optimise uptime, worker productivity, critical asset health and operational expenses while providing better visibility into sustainability KPIs.

Data centres play an ever more critical role in keeping the global economy productive, while closer to home they support the conveniences of daily life — from working remotely to shopping online. By digitalising, aggregating and analysing disparate critical systems into a unified data lake, the analytics produced by the on-premise Honeywell Data Center Suite provides operators more holistic, actionable information to help boost efficiency and decrease costs. Based on the open architecture Niagara Framework, it combines data from both operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) infrastructure, securely enhancing situational awareness at site level as well as global fleet level, enabling condition-based maintenance to reduce downtime risk and operational expenses.

Given the exponentially increasing demand – as of April 2022, hyperscale operators planned to build 314 new facilities[i] – data centre managers are often forced to do more with less, while at the same time being pressured to improve uptime, reduce costs and minimise energy consumption. User-friendly tools that automate processes can help reduce the chance for human error, which caused major outages over the last three years among 40% of organisations surveyed by the Uptime Institute,[ii] often driven by ignored or inadequate procedures. It can also help improve a data centre’s overall efficiency.

The Honeywell Data Center Suite’s tools include:

Data Center Manager that integrates delivers situational site-level awareness of both OT (critical power and thermal assets) and critical IT assets data in a vendor-agnostic dashboard;

Portfolio View that enables data centre owners to monitor global network operations holistically via an on-premise tool across a fleet of data centers and make data-driven decisions to better achieve their uptime and sustainability goals; and

Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance, a software-as-a-service solution that monitors data centre assets and detects early signs of anomalous intrinsic operations before it leads to potentially costly downtime.

“Demand for data storage, transfer and processing is insatiable worldwide, which makes it more challenging than ever to run and scale these facilities effectively from a design, build and operations perspective,” said Chris McLaughlin, vice president of offering management, Honeywell Building Technologies. “Honeywell is expanding its offerings in data centres to allow facility managers to derive actionable insights securely from their own data to help protect uptime, manage maintenance, reduce energy use and achieve scaling agility.”

Improve data centre situational awareness, uptime and operational efficiency

The Data Center Manager allows proactive monitoring and management of critical infrastructure by aggregating OT and IT data – which previously had to be collected manually from disparate systems – into a single source. The solution helps operators diagnose alarms and root causes of issues, execute workflows to triage situations, improve response times and reduce human error potential. Featuring a persona-optimised user experience to minimise the technician’s cognitive load, it proactively generates situation-specific recommendations to better preserve uptime and maintain service-level agreement (SLA) compliance. It also provides insights into the site’s energy and carbon use.  

Monitor uptime and sustainability KPIs across a fleet of facilities

Portfolio View integrates with Data Center Manager to allows users to securely monitor a global fleet of data centres. It allows easy navigation from a fleet-level view down to individual sites, generating a KPI-based score for each site that profiles metrics such as uptime; critical sustainability KPIs such as power usage effectiveness (PUE), carbon usage effectiveness (CUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE); space and capacity utilisation; and energy consumption. Portfolio View also generates logs and reports to keep the C-suite apprised of fleetwide performance and trends, as well as individual site anomalies.

Increase predictability, reliability and lifespan of critical assets

Data centres require uninterrupted power and reliable cooling systems to prevent costly downtime. Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance introduces a condition-based maintenance strategy to detect early, intrinsic signs of critical asset problems before it results in system downtime. It can help facility managers improve uptime and resiliency, increase asset service life, and reduce maintenance and energy costs. Advanced fault-detection analytics provide users with real-time, actionable intelligence on asset performance, pre-failure alerts and benchmarks for zone temperature control, asset availability, energy consumption and service case performance. Additionally, the cloud-based Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance can be coupled with remote building management to further deliver an outcome-based, service level agreement performance.