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Twenty timeless fundamentals of facilities

management
Rich Schiesser
When planning something as complicated as a datacenter, it is inevitable that something is
going to get overlooked. This article from Informit's IT Management Reference Guide
provides a list and some details of facility management elements to help you make sure all the
bases are covered.
If we were to ask typical infrastructure managers to name the major elements of facilities
management, they would likely mention common items such as air conditioning, electrical
power, and perhaps fire suppression. Some may also mention smoke detection, uninterruptible
power supplies (UPS), and controlled physical access. Few of them would likely include less
common entities such as electrical grounding, vault protection, and static electricity. This
article describes both the well-known and the not so well-known physical entities of a typical
modern data center. The following is a comprehensive list of the major elements of facilities
management.
Major Elements of Facilities Management
1. Air conditioning
2. Humidity
3. Electrical power
4. Static electricity
5. Electrical grounding
6. Uninterruptible power supply (UPS)
7. Backup UPS batteries
8. Backup generator
9. Water detection
10. Smoke detection
11. Fire suppression
12. Gas Leaks
13. Facility monitoring with alarms
14. Earthquake safeguards
15. Safety training
16. Supplier management
17. Controlled physical access
18. Protected vaults
19. Physical location
20. Classified environment
Temperature and humidity levels should be monitored constantly, either electronically or with
recording charts, and reviewed once each shift to detect any unusual trends. Many shops
today find it more cost-efficient to use automatic remote monitoring with third party vendors
for these measurements during off-hours. In these cases, checks should be made to ensure that
monitoring is occurring satisfactorily, and that the vendor knows who to call, how to escalate,
and which alternate numbers to use. I know of a few recent instances in which wrong numbers
were used, and in one case, where the call was made only after two hours had elapsed from
the time a high temperature alarm and alerts were activated. Fortunately, no permanent
damage to equipment was sustained, although the delayed response resulted in a four hour
outage to critical online systems.
Temperature hot spots are becoming more of a concern these days for data center directors
and facilities managers. Equipment such as blade servers compact disk arrays tend to
concentrate the production of heat into smaller confined areas of a data center. Most high
capacity air conditioning systems for data centers distribute the cooling in a uniform manner.
Special venting, the re-routing of ducts and the positioning of fans can direct the cooled air to
where it is needed most.
Electrical power includes continuous supply at the proper voltage, current, and phasing as
well as the conditioning of the power. Conditioning purifies the quality of the electricity for
greater reliability. It involves filtering out stray magnetic fields that can induce unwanted
inductance, doing the same to stray electrical fields that can generate unwanted capacitance,
and providing surge suppression to prevent voltage spikes. Static electricity, which affects the
operation of sensitive equipment, can build up in conductive materials such as carpeting,
clothing, draperies, and other non-insulating fibers. Antistatic devices can be installed to
minimize this condition. Proper grounding is required to eliminate outages and potential
human injury due to short circuits. Another element sometimes overlooked is whether
batteries that support an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) are kept fully charged.
Water and smoke detection are common environmental guards in today's data centers as are
fire suppression mechanisms. Facility monitoring systems and their alarms should be visible
and audible enough to be seen and heard from almost any area in the computer room, even
when noisy equipment such as printers are running at their loudest. Equipment should be
anchored and secured to withstand moderate earthquakes. Large mainframes decades ago
used to be safely anchored, in part, by the massive plumbing for water-cooled processors and
by the huge bus and tag cables that interconnected the various units. In today's era of fiber-
optic cables, air-cooled processors, and smaller boxes designed for non-raised flooring, this
built-in anchoring of equipment is no longer as prevalent.
Emergency preparedness for earthquakes and other natural or man-made disasters should be a
basic part of general safety training for all personnel working inside a data center. They
should be knowledgeable about emergency powering off, evacuation procedures, first-aid
assistance, and emergency telephone numbers. Providing training to data center suppliers in
these matters is also recommended.
Most data centers have acceptable methods of controlling physical access into their machine
rooms, but not always for vaults or rooms that store sensitive documents, check stock, or
tapes. The physical location of a data center can also be problematic. A basement level may
be safe and secure from the outside, but it might also be exposed to water leaks and
evacuation obstacles, particularly in older buildings. Locating a data center along outside
walls of a building can sometimes contribute to sabotage from the outside.
Classified environments almost always require data centers to be located as far away from
outside walls as possible to safeguard them from outside physical forces such as bombs or
projectiles, as well as from electronic sensing devices.
In fairness to infrastructure managers and operations personnel, several of these elements may
be under the management of a company's facilities department. In these cases, no one in IT
would have direct responsibility. But even in this instance, infrastructure personnel and
operations managers would normally want and need to know who to go to in the facilities
department for specific types of environmental issues. Read more of Informit's IT
Management Reference Guide.

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