On July 1 of this year, the Uptime Institute will release a new benchmark for rating data centers on the basis of their operational sustainability. This benchmark complements the organization's tier standards.

The new standard will assess a data center on the basis of three main parameters—namely, location, staffing and processes. Of course, some companies and experts are already expressing concern over the location factor. This is understandable, since climatic conditions, which vary with geographical region, are not at all under the control of data center technology and its management. So, a data center in a relatively extreme location could potentially receive a poor rating despite its use of the best technology. But, as one might recognize, the basic purpose of the benchmark is to judge a data center for its operational sustainability, so whether a particular factor is causing lower sustainability, either internally or externally, is unimportant as long as it provides a reasonably fair indication of the data center's level of sustainability.

As public awareness of environmental issues has grown, data centers have come under increasing pressure, both from without and from within, to become more “green.” Construction and operation of energy-efficient data centers with low environmental impact has become a badge of honor for some companies, who tout their environmental friendliness as a key benefit of their data centers. Of course, companies in other markets are also pursuing construction and renovation that makes “going green” a goal. To aid the companies in reaching this goal, and to aid the public in being able to recognize legitimate “green” building practices, various third-party ratings systems have been developed to assess and certify the environmental friendliness of a building.

With the increased reliance on the availability of data and applications, management of critical data center components becomes ever more important.  The typical physical infrastructure of a data center contains a variety of critical devices from multiple manufacturers, including routers, PDUs, UPSs, power meters, rack and environmental monitors, CRAC units, generators, security systems, IP cameras and more. 

The large data center is a complex environment that must meet numerous key operational requirements to satisfy its customers’ service level agreements (SLAs). In order to meet SLAs, it must support redundancy in power backup, telecommunications and network connectivity to ensure reliability and maximum uptime. Clean, continuous power, as well as precision air-handling and cooling, is needed for all critical systems. State-of-the-art fire suppression systems, seismic engineering, and physical security measures are used to thwart physical and environmental threats. In addition, skilled 24/7/365 hands-on support is needed to maintain these requirements.

Cisco is making moves in all directions and this one has them developing a new technology that will place an entire building energy management system under it wing.

A new data model developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their colleagues at other universities and in the private sector will help facilities and buildings save power through automated demand response technology, and advance the development of the Smart Grid.

The tone was set for the 2009 spring Data Center World, presented by AFCOM well before the key note speech was given by Sun’s CTO, Greg Papadopoulus. In all honesty the tone for this year’s data center event was set last year when the economy was showing signs of falling and the focus in the data center community was on costs savings disguised as energy efficiency or Green IT. Today, it is clear that Green IT is taking a back seat to cost savings as well as a solid return on investment (ROI).

A data center that is reliable is also maintainable. Maintainability is commonly not discussed when speaking of reliability, but the two go hand in hand. What is maintainability?