Honeywell launched its Data Centre 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.
Based on Niagara Framework
Data centers play an ever more critical role in keeping the global economy productive, while closer to home, they support the conveniences of daily life — from working remotely to shopping online. By digitalizing, aggregating, and analyzing disparate critical systems into a unified data lake, the analytics produced by the on-premises Honeywell Data Centre 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 operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) infrastructure, securely enhancing situational awareness at the site level and the global fleet level, enabling condition-based maintenance to reduce downtime risk and operational expenses.
Given the exponentially increasing demand – as of April 2022, hyperscale operators planned to build 314 new facilities – 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.
User-friendly tools
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 center owners to monitor global network operations holistically via an on-premises tool across a fleet of data centers and make data-driven decisions to achieve their uptime and sustainability goals better; and
- Honeywell Forge Digitised Maintenance is 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.
Chris McLaughlin, vice president of offering management, Honeywell Building Technologies said,
« Demand for data storage, transfer and processing are insatiable worldwide, which 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. »
Improve data center situational awareness, uptime, and operational efficiency
The Data Centre 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 preserve uptime better 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 allow users to monitor a global fleet of data centers securely. 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 and 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 Digitised 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 Digitised Maintenance can be coupled with remote building management to deliver an outcome-based, service-level agreement performance further.