Latin America. Did you know that just a second of a power outage can cause a costly drop for hours? According to the company Vertiv, formerly Emerson, the average cost of a data center outage approaches $8,851 per minute according to the Ponemon Institute's "2016 Study on the Causes of Data Center Outages."
In recent years, the demand for data storage and investments in data centers have grown significantly. This is the result of increased content generation from social media, digital marketing, and online courses. For example, every minute the equivalent of 24 hours of recordings is sent to Youtube according to the internet.org site: More than 34,560 hours in videos per day! In addition, there are currently service companies that depend 100 percent on online platforms and were not possible five years ago: the all-digital bank Nubank, the buying and selling platform OLX, the map and road sharing application Waze, and the controversial transport company UBER.
Consequently, there is a direct relationship between the operation of data centers and the financial performance of a company: if critical facilities go down, companies cannot perform the most basic operations for which they were created, which translates into loss of profits and customers. In a fully connected world, a failure, or a delay, in any of these operations translates into the loss of a sale, an opportunity and the reputation of the company.
Therefore, companies benefit from the implementation in their facilities of equipment and good practices that guarantee the safe operation of servers, databases and peripherals despite power outages and other alterations.
Here are Vertiv's tips for avoiding data center outages:
Preventive maintenance:
Initial investments in equipment for data center infrastructure must be accompanied by services to reach or exceed the estimated life of data centers. To achieve the expected operation, preventive checks and maintenance must be carried out, as recommended by manufacturers, on equipment that requires periodic component change and testing to avoid failures.
UPS Battery Monitoring:
Even when UPS equipment, batteries and distribution boards offer high reliability, it is necessary to monitor this infrastructure and operating conditions. In the case of batteries, for example, it is recommended to monitor each cell to estimate the service life, charge level and connections. A single damaged battery inside the bank increases the risk of a facility crash.
Remote Infrastructure Access and Monitoring:
It is recommended to also monitor the general condition of the data center: the electrical connection, the generator set, the quality of the electrical network, the frequency, the status of the UPS, the batteries, the temperature sensors, the humidification / dehumidification of the environment, the peripherals, the servers, the KVM switches and the networks.
Optimization of energy consumption:
In addition to monitoring the energy consumption of each asset in the data center infrastructure, there are best practices for achieving efficient use of upS and precision air conditioning systems. These practices include matching the airflow and cooling capacity of each of the air conditioning units with the needs of the environment. This is achieved with intelligent controls that communicate with all the units of the system and make them work together, or "teamwork". There are also free-cooling technologies, which increase energy savings by taking advantage of low temperatures outside to cool the data center.
