and impact assessment
Engineering and design
Project management
Testing and commissioning
Documentation
Education/training and certifications with annual re‐certification
Operations and maintenance
When designing a data processing center, it is important to hire competent professionals to advise each step of the way. If the data processing center is being installed in an existing building, you do not have the luxury of designing the electrical system from scratch. A proficient electrical engineer will design a system that makes the most out of the existing electrical distribution. Use electrical contractors who are experienced in data processing installations. Do not attempt to save money using the full 40% capacity for a conduit; because as quickly as new, state‐of‐art equipment is installed, it is de‐installed. Those same number 12 wires will need to come out of the conduit without disturbing the working computer hardware.
Have an experienced electrical testing firm inspect the electrical system, perform tests on circuit breakers, and use thermal‐scan equipment to find “hot spots” due to improper connections or faulty equipment. Finally, plan for routine facility shutdowns to perform preventative maintenance on all critical equipment. Facility managers must not underestimate the cost‐effectiveness of a thorough preventative maintenance program, nor must they allow senior management to do so. Critical system maintenance is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Again, do you want electrical outages to be scheduled or unscheduled?
Integrating the ideal critical infrastructure is just about impossible. Therefore, seek out the best possible industry authorities to solve your problems. Competent consultants will have the knowledge, tools, testing equipment, training, and experience necessary to understand the risk tolerance of your company, as well as recommend and implement the proper and most advanced proven designs.
Equipment manufacturers and service providers are challenged to find and retain the industry’s top technicians. As 24/7 operations become more prevalent, the available talent pool will diminish. This could cause response times to increase from the current industry standard of 4 hours. Therefore, the human element has a significant impact in risk and reliability.
No matter which firms you choose, always ask for sample reports, testing procedures, and references. Your decisions will determine the system’s ultimate reliability, as well as how easy the system is to maintain. Seek experienced professionals from both your own company, and third parties for information systems, property and operations managers, space planners, and the best consultants in the industry for all engineering disciplines. The bottom line is to have proven organizations working on your project. Systems that are not designed, installed, and operated optimally by your operations team will only hurt the operations of your company and cause discontent down the road.
3.5 The Mission Critical Facilities Manager and the Importance of the Boardroom
To date, the mission critical facilities manager has not achieved high levels of prestige within the corporate world. This means that if the requirements are 24/7, forever, the mission critical facilities manager must work hard to have a voice in the boardroom. The board can then become a powerful voice that supports the facilities manager and establish a standard for managing the risks associated with older equipment or maintenance cuts. For instance, relying on a UPS system that has reached the end of its useful life, but is still deployed due to cost constraints increases the risk of failure. The facilities manager is in a unique position to advise and paint vivid scenarios to the board. Imagine incurring losses due to downtime, plus damage to the capital equipment that is keeping the Fortune 1000 company in business.
Board members understand this language: it is comparable to managing and analyzing risk in other avenues, such as whether to invest in emerging markets in unstable economies. The risk is one and the same; the loss is measured in the bottom line.
The facilities engineering department should be run and evaluated just like any other business line; it should show a profit. But instead of increased revenue, the business line shows increased uptime, which can be equated monetarily, plus far less risk. It is imperative that the facilities engineering department be given the tools and the human resources necessary to implement the correct preventative maintenance training, and document management requirements, with the support of all company business lines.
3.6 Quantifying Reliability and Availability
Data center reliability ultimately depends on the organization as a whole weighing the dangers of outages against available enhancement measures. Reliability modeling is an essential tool for designing and evaluating mission critical facilities. The conceptual phase, or programming, of the design, should include a full Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) methodology. The design team must quantify performance (reliability and availability) against cost in order to push fundamental design decisions through the approval process.
Reliability predictions are only as good as the ability to model the actual system. In past reliability studies, major insight was gained into various electrical distribution configurations using IEEE Standard 493‐2007 Recommended Practice for the Design of Reliable Industrial and Commercial Power Systems, or, The IEEE Gold Book. It is also the major source of data on failure and repair rates for electrical equipment. There are, however, aspects of the electrical distribution system for a critical facility that differ from other industrial and commercial facilities. Therefore, internal data accumulated from the engineer’s practical experience is needed to complement the Gold Book information.
Reliability analysis with PRA software provides a number of significant improvements over earlier, conventional reliability methods. The software incorporates reliability models to evaluate and calculate reliability, availability, unreliability, and unavailability. The results are compared to a cost analysis to help reach a decision about facility design. The process of evaluating reliability includes:
Analyzing any existing systems and calculating the reliability of the facility as it is currently configured.
Developing solutions that will increase the reliability of the facility.
Calculate the reliability with the solutions applied to the existing systems.
Evaluate the cost of applying the solutions.
3.6.1 Review of Reliability Terminology
Reliability (R) is the probability that a product or service will operate properly for a specified period of time under design operating conditions without failure.
The failure rate (λ) is defined as the probability that a failure per unit time occurs in the interval, given that no failure has occurred prior to the beginning of the interval.
For a constant failure rate λ, reliability as a function of time is:
Mean time between failures (MTBF), as its name implies, is the mean of the probability distribution function of failure. For a statistically large sample, it is the average time the equipment performed its intended function between failures. For the example of a constant failure rate:
Mean time to repair (MTTR) is the average time it takes to repair the failure and get the equipment back into service.
Availability (A): Availability is the long‐term average fraction of time that a component or system is in service and satisfactorily performing its intended function. This is also called steady‐state