Honeywell’s Data Center Suite to provide visibility into sustainability KPIs

One of the biggest problems with data center management today is the number of tools, solutions, and dashboards needed to manage it. While technology continues to enable data centers to be more efficient in their output, monitoring them was still a challenge.

Currently, managing the data center requires employees to keep track of many tasks. In often cases, they end up having to do more with less, resulting in long periods of time needed to complete a task. Some data centers have innovated certain processes but most of the information was still in a silo.

To help deal with these issues, Honeywell has launched its Data Center Suite, a portfolio of outcome-based software solutions that help data center managers and owners optimize uptime, worker productivity, critical asset health and operational expenses while providing better visibility into sustainability KPIs.

By digitalizing, aggregating and analyzing disparate critical systems into a unified data lake, the analytics produced by the on-premise Honeywell Data Center Suite provides operators with more holistic, actionable information to help boost efficiency and decrease costs. Based on the open architecture Niagara Framework, it combines data from both operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) infrastructure, securely enhancing situational awareness at the site level as well as the global fleet level, enabling condition-based maintenance to reduce downtime risk and operational expenses.

Given the exponentially increasing demand, data center managers are often forced to do more with less, while at the same time being pressured to improve uptime, reduce costs and minimize energy consumption. 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 organizations surveyed by the Uptime Institute, often driven by ignored or inadequate procedures. It can also help improve a data center’s overall efficiency.

The Honeywell Data Center Suite’s tools include:

• Data Center Manager that integrates and 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 center owners to monitor global network operations holistically via an on-premise tool across a fleet of data centers and make data-driven decisions to better achieve their uptime and sustainability goals; and
• Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance, a software-as-a-service solution that monitors data center assets and detects early signs of anomalous intrinsic operations before it leads to potentially costly downtime.

Enhancing the capabilities of data center management

During Tech Week Singapore recently, Alpesh Saraiya, Senior Director for Data Center Offering Management showcased some of the capabilities of the Data Center Suite. Saraiya explained that the suite can be customized to the operator’s needs to focus on the insights that they need to get the most input on.

What makes the Suite appealing for operators is that it enables them to do more with less now. For example, a data center engineer in the past would need to spend hours collecting all the information on the amount of power used to create a report to highlight carbon emissions to send to the management. With the suite, the entire process is automated on the dashboard. The staff would only need to generate the report through the Portfolio View and send it with the latest information.

Improve data center situational awareness, uptime and operational efficiency

The Data Center Manager allows proactive monitoring and management 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 error potential. Featuring a persona-optimized user experience to minimize the technician’s cognitive load, it proactively 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 Center Manager to allow users to securely monitor a global fleet of data centers. It allows easy navigation from a fleet-level view down to individual sites, generating a KPI-based score for each site that profiles metrics such as uptime; critical sustainability KPIs such as power usage effectiveness (PUE), carbon usage effectiveness (CUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE); space and capacity utilization; and energy consumption. Portfolio View also 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 centers require uninterrupted power and reliable cooling systems to prevent costly downtime. Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance introduces a condition-based 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 real-time, actionable intelligence on asset performance, pre-failure alerts and benchmarks for zone temperature control, asset availability, energy consumption and service case performance. Additionally, the cloud-based Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance can be coupled with remote building management to further deliver an outcome-based, service-level agreement performance.

For Chris McLaughlin, vice president of offering management, Honeywell Building Technologies, as demand for data storage, transfer and processing is insatiable worldwide, it makes it more challenging than ever to run and scale these facilities effectively from a design, build and operations perspective.

“Honeywell is expanding its offerings in data centers 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,” added McLaughlin.

 

---

---

---

---