IDC Watch | Excellence in Operations: Safeguarding Data Centers

Introduction:

In this article, we will share insights on data center operational solutions. A well-operated data center can run efficiently without disruptions. Through operational excellence, we can minimize human errors, ensuring stability and reliability in the data center, thus providing a solid foundation for enterprises' digital transformation.

Who Pays for Data Center Failures?

Downtime not only causes business interruptions and financial losses but also damages a company’s reputation.

宕机[BZ1] According to the latest survey from Uptime Institute this year, there are on average 10 to 20 major data center failures globally each year, leading to severe economic and reputational losses. More than half of the operators surveyed reported that the most recent significant outage cost them over $100, 000.[1]

Avoiding interruptions is thus a key priority for digital infrastructure operators, and the importance of operational excellence has become increasingly clear. Through excellent operations, data centers can achieve efficient, reliable, and secure performance, providing stable digital infrastructure support, reducing operational costs, and enhancing economic benefits.

To minimize downtime, experts work tirelessly to ensure excellence in every aspect of data center operations, increasing resilience by implementing systems such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) to provide power backup during main power failures, diversified fiber cabling to ensure stable data transmission even when cables are cut, backup generators for continuous power supply, and redundant server designs that seamlessly switch services when the main server fails.

These designs significantly ensure that data centers maintain high availability and resilience in the face of power failures, network interruptions, or hardware malfunctions, enabling the data centers to continuously and reliably serve users.

However, even optimized designs cannot entirely prevent data center outages. According to Uptime Institute's 2023 Annual Outage Analysis, human error is one of the main causes of data center failures. In fact, human error accounts for a large proportion of all downtime incidents. While data center failures appear to be decreasing, the cost of these failures continues to rise.[2]

Human error: an unavoidable challenge for data centers

Data centers typically house a vast number of servers, storage devices, network equipment, and other hardware that require manual monitoring, configuration, and maintenance to ensure their proper functioning and efficient use.

Given the scale and complexity of these systems, human errors seem inevitable. These errors can include misconfigurations of networks, servers, or storage devices, operational mistakes such as accidentally shutting down critical equipment or performing improper maintenance, and mismanagement of software updates or patches, as well as human oversights that create security vulnerabilities.

As the managers and maintainers of data centers, operators bear the responsibility of ensuring that data center equipment and supporting infrastructure function properly while preventing downtime caused by maintenance or configuration errors. This means data centers need to continuously monitor equipment status, detect and address potential issues promptly, conduct scientific maintenance of supporting infrastructure, and perform regular checks and upkeep of key facilities such as cooling and power systems. Change management is also essential, with operators following standard operating procedures to ensure any maintenance work is carefully planned, tested, and validated to prevent downtime from maintenance or configuration errors.

Uptime Institute’s 2023 Annual Outage Analysis also points out that human error-related outages are often due to staff failing to follow procedures or flaws in the procedures themselves. In global annual surveys from 2019 to 2022, most managers and operators indicated that with better management and processes, they could have mitigated the impact of outages.

Achieving operational excellence to ensure business continuity

It is clear that achieving operational excellence and reducing human error is crucial to the stability of data centers. This requires data center teams to implement a series of measures such as proactive monitoring, talent development, and external certifications to minimize the likelihood of outages caused by human error, ensuring continuous, stable, and efficient data center operations.

Below are explanations of the importance of proactive monitoring, talent development, and external certifications to the operational excellence of data centers:

Proactive monitoring: Data centers need to establish comprehensive proactive monitoring systems that continuously track critical parameters such as network performance, power supply, temperature, humidity, and security to ensure the stability of data center systems. This helps identify potential issues early and take preventive measures, minimizing the impact of failures. In the current era of rapid advancements in large language models and artificial intelligence, it is also possible to incorporate AI-related features to further enhance the automation and intelligence of monitoring systems.

Talent development: Having qualified personnel and providing continuous training and development opportunities are essential for ensuring the efficient operation of data centers. Data centers require a sufficient number of skilled professionals to maintain and manage facilities, so operators need to strategically match talent structures within their teams to ensure there is adequate expertise to meet increasingly complex technical challenges. Uptime Institute’s 2023 Annual Outage Analysis emphasizes that good training, along with well-considered and rehearsed processes, plays a critical role in reducing outages and can maximize cost savings.

External certification: Obtaining relevant industry certifications, such as Uptime Institute’s three-stage certifications for design, construction, and operations, provides authoritative and objective proof of a data center’s compliance, reliability, and security. More importantly, external certification evaluations often involve audits of systems, processes, controls, security measures, and disaster recovery capabilities, helping data centers identify and correct existing issues or potential risks. This builds an effective management system, enhances risk awareness, and enables early detection and resolution of potential problems, reducing operational risks.

Chayora achieves operational excellence through a three-pronged approach: proactive monitoring, talent development, and external certifications. Chayora’s diverse operations team consists of data center experts from several global technology companies and public cloud giants, providing clients with both local and remote support. Their operations have received high marks for data security, service reliability, and prompt responsiveness, earning praise and recognition from clients. In Chayora’s 360-degree centralized management system, intelligent management allows for real-time monitoring of data center operations, improving operational efficiency by 15%. This system has received high praise from the domestic industry and clients alike. At the 11th Data Center Standards Conference, this system was awarded the "Data Center Achievement Award" by the China Engineering Construction Standardization Association, under the approval of the Ministry of Science and Technology’s National Office for Science and Technology Awards. A client from Chayora’s Tianjin campus expressed their appreciation in a letter, stating, “Chayora’s excellent operational services not only meet our high requirements for security and reliability but also offer agile and flexible operational advantages. They have helped us achieve two years of zero failures and can even anticipate our needs ahead of time, which has been pleasantly surprising.”

Chayora achieves operational excellence through a three-pronged approach: proactive monitoring, talent development, and external certifications. Chayora’s diverse operations team consists of data center experts from several global technology companies and public cloud giants, providing clients with both local and remote support. Their operations have received high marks for data security, service reliability, and prompt responsiveness, earning praise and recognition from clients. In Chayora’s 360-degree centralized management system, intelligent management allows for real-time monitoring of data center operations, improving operational efficiency by 15%. This system has received high praise from the domestic industry and clients alike. At the 11th Data Center Standards Conference, this system was awarded the "Data Center Achievement Award" by the China Engineering Construction Standardization Association, under the approval of the Ministry of Science and Technology’s National Office for Science and Technology Awards. A client from Chayora’s Tianjin campus expressed their appreciation in a letter, stating, “Chayora’s excellent operational services not only meet our high requirements for security and reliability but also offer agile and flexible operational advantages. They have helped us achieve two years of zero failures and can even anticipate our needs ahead of time, which has been pleasantly surprising.”