We believe that when it comes to uptime, designing and building a great data centre is just part of the story. The meticulous organisation and management of the data centre itself is also key to assuring maximum performance and 24 x 7 availability and responsiveness.

According to the Uptime Institute – an independent global organisation and leading authority in the data centre sector – 70% of incidents and crises in data centres are primarily associated with human error and management shortfalls.

So, what does it take to implement the best-in-class operational standards that are so essential to ensuring the availability of mission-critical compute resources is never compromised?

Here are our top five tips on what needs to be in place to ensure a data centre is effective and reliable in the long term:

1. Staffing and organisation

Having enough qualified and importantly experienced staff to run the data centre and perform appropriate maintenance is a must. Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined to ensure the entire organisation is focused on achieving the desired uptime objectives.

2. Maintenance

Preventative and predictive maintenance programmes need to be in place to minimise equipment failures and ensure optimum performance. That includes implementing concurrent maintainability infrastructures and processes to eliminate any single point of failure. So, should any component fail or be intentionally shut down, there’s no disruption.

3. Training

As uptime objectives or site complexity increases, a rigorous training and professional development programme is essential to ensure staff stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and best practice approaches.

4. Planning, coordination and management

From ensuring the regular updating of technical documentation, to putting in place and testing processes to ensure teams are able to intervene in a fast and co-ordinated way in the event of a failure or crisis, the meticulous evaluation of the entire infrastructure is key to maximising performance.

5. Operating conditions

From defining and documenting capacity to ensure adequate power and cooling, to undertaking load management decisions, network and IT application topology and integrated electrical and mechanical engineering systems, it all needs to be monitored 24 x 7 to assure continuous availability and responsiveness.

While a data centre’s design is a strong foundation, keeping businesses running 24 x 7 requires solid processes, highly qualified staff and high standards for operational excellence.

Tony Over