Honeywell, a provider of connected buildings, launched its Data Centre Suite, a portfolio of solutions that help data centre managers optimise uptime, worker productivity, critical asset health and operational expenses while providing better visibility into sustainability KPIs.
What does the solution mean for the industry?
Data centres play an ever more critical role in keeping the 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-premises Honeywell Data Centre 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 operational technology (OT) and IT infrastructure, enhancing situational awareness at site level and fleet level, enabling condition-based maintenance to reduce downtime risk and operational costs.
Given the increasing demand – as of April 2022, hyperscale operators planned to build 314 facilities – 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.
“Demand for data storage, transfer and processing is insatiable, which makes it more challenging than ever to run and scale these facilities effectively from a design, build and operations perspective,” said Chris McLaughlin, VP of offering management, Honeywell.
“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,” Chris McLaughlin further said.
Why is Honeywell’s solution a game changer?
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 companies surveyed by the Uptime Institute, often driven by ignored or inadequate procedures. It can also help improve a data centre’s overall efficiency. The Honeywell Data Centre Suite’s tools include:
- Data Centre 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-premises tool across a fleet of data centres and make data-driven decisions to better achieve their uptime and sustainability goals; and
- Honeywell Forge Digitised 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.
Improve situational awareness, uptime and operational efficiency
The Data Centre Manager allows proactive monitoring 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 errors.
Featuring a persona-optimised UX to minimise the technician’s cognitive load, it 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 Centre 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 like uptime; critical sustainability KPIs such as power usage effectiveness, carbon usage effectiveness and water usage effectiveness (WUE); space and capacity utilisation; and energy consumption.
In addition, it is worth noting that Portfolio View 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 Digitised Maintenance introduces a 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 actionable intelligence on asset performance, pre-failure alerts and benchmarks for zone temperature control, asset availability, energy consumption and service case performance.
The cloud-based Honeywell Forge Digitised Maintenance can be coupled with remote building management to further deliver an outcome-based, service level agreement performance.
