Data Centre Operational Management

Course details

This design course offers best-practice data centre and computer room design principals and gives certification to attendees within the framework of the CIBSE Continuing Professional Development scheme.

Attendees on the course follow a series of design exercises throughout the course to give a hands-on appreciation of the basics of data centre design. The range of this training means that attendees can gain valuable information from improving basic computer room design all the way up to outline specification of enterprise-grade data centre design.

Using the practical experience from auditing and designing computer rooms and data centers comes this 2-day course that focuses on the best practices to keep the data centre operational at the level of resilience desired. Not only does a good data centre have to be designed and built to best practices but also operated and maintained throughout its working life.

Target Audience

• Data centre operators
• IT Managers wanting to improve their existing facility.
• Facilities managers and estates directors planning a new facility.
• Companies needing to reduce their electricity consumption in IT.
• Manufacturers and contractors wishing to understand the data centre ‘bigger picture’
• Engineering consultants working in this field.
• Architects and Civil Engineers designing data centre buildings.
• Cisco, IBM, 3Com, Alcatel, Brocade, HP ProCurve, Huawei, Juniper, and Nortel Channel Partners

Objectives

• Lowering Risk
• Managing Change
• Preparing for the unexpected
• Understanding the capacity of your data centre
• Maintaining an optimised computer room layout
• Monitoring and keeping control of UPS, Power supply and generator loads
• Monitoring and keeping control of air conditioning capacity
• Improving efficiencies and lowering energy consumption
• Health and Safety
• Building regulations and complying with them
• International and UK Standards
• Control of cabling
• EU Code of Conduct on Data Centres

Course Outline

Housekeeping

• Keeping it clean
• ‘Ordinary’ cleaning and specialist cleaning
• Who does what? Assigning housekeeping and
• maintenance tasks to internal staff or external contractors
• Who do you call when things go wrong?
• Internal and external maintenance
• Statutory requirements for lighting, disabled access, fire alarm etc
• Exercise 1 Identify the organizational roles and responsibilities in the Data Centre.

Optimizing equipment layouts

• Ideal rack layouts and hot aisle/cold aisle models
• Optimizing equipment layout within a rack
• Cabling: how not to make a mess
• Labeling and administration schemes, from paper to asset management software
• Exercise 2 Overheating calcs.
• Exercise 3 Identifying faults in real examples.

Understanding the power flow

• The energy train from mains input to the rack, in block diagram form
• Essential block diagram items e.g. generators, UPS, batteries, PDU etc
• N, N+1 and 2N models
• Amps, volts, kW, kVA and power factor
• Balancing your phases!
• Keeping power and data apart
• Exercise 4 Balancing 3 phase
• Exercise 5 Battery & UPS Capacity
• Exercise 6 Capacity Planning – cooling and Power

Air Conditioning for the IT environment

• How air conditioning works
• Estimating heat loads and air conditioning sizing
• IT cooling options
• Maximizing the efficiency of air cooling
• Liquid cooling methods
• Tier 1-4, N, N+1 and 2N designs

Building Management Systems and monitoring

• What is a BMS?
• What should be monitored and when
• EU Code of conduct requirements
• Bringing it all together with a Control Room

Policies and procedures

• Defining the policies and procedures needed to run a successful data centre
• Asset register
• Visitor and security policy
• Integrated fire policy
• Building operational settings
• Critical alarms and settings
• Maintenance plans
• Incident management
• Call list
• Permit to work
• Site H&S manual
• Change control and work orders
• Fire cause and effect algorithm
• Staff and contractor proof of competence
• Risk assessment and audit
• Disaster recovery plan

Fire safety procedures

• Fire safety plans
• Fire detection methods
• Fire alarm methods
• Integrating fire, BMS, HVAC and power systems
• Fire suppression techniques
• Staff training and risk assessment

Physical security policies

• TIA 942 security definitions
• British Government Policy framework
• BICSI 002 standard
• Payment Card Industry security standard
• Access control
• CCTV
• Visitor and security policy

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

• ISO 27000 series
• BS25777
• NFPA 1600
• Combining good design and procedures to ensure
• business continuity
• Defining DR requirements
• Defining a DR plan and rehearsing it
• Communicating with customers and stakeholders