Honeywell, a Fortune 100 technology company delivering industry specific solutions, has launched its Data Center Suite. It’s a portfolio of outcome-based software solutions that help data center managers and owners optimize facility uptime, worker productivity, critical asset health, and operational expenses, while providing better visibility into sustainability KPIs.
The analytics created by the on-premise Honeywell Data Center Suite would give data center operators more comprehensive, useful information to assist increase productivity and cut costs. This is done by digitalizing, gathering, and analyzing many essential systems into a single data lake. Based on the open architecture Niagara Framework, it integrates data from operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) infrastructure to securely improve situational awareness at the site and fleet levels, enabling condition-based maintenance to lower the risk of downtime and operational costs.
Data center administrators frequently have to do more with less because of the rapidly growing demand – as of April 2022, hyperscale operators expected to build 314 new facilities – while being under pressure to increase uptime, lower prices, and cut down on energy use, stated Honeywell. Easy-to-use technologies that automate operations might lessen the likelihood of human mistake, which is blamed for severe outages that occurred over the past three years in 40 percent of the firms evaluated by the Uptime Institute, frequently as a result of disregarded or insufficient procedures, Honeywell added. Additionally, it can increase a data center’s general effectiveness.
Key features of the Honeywell Data Center Suite’s tools include:
- Data Center Manager – OT (critical power and thermal assets) and key IT asset data are integrated and delivered at the site level in a vendor-neutral dashboard.
- Portfolio View – that enables data center owners to make data-driven decisions to more effectively meet their uptime and sustainability goals by monitoring global network operations holistically via an on-premise solution across a fleet of data centers.
- Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance – a software-as-a-service program that keeps an eye on data center equipment and finds early indications of abnormal intrinsic activities before they result in potentially expensive downtime.
“Demand for data storage, transfer and processing is insatiable worldwide, which makes it more challenging than ever to run and scale these facilities effectively from a design, build and operations perspective,” said Chris McLaughlin, Vice President of Offering Management, Honeywell Building Technologies. “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.”
Honeywell’s Data Center Manager tool combines OT and IT data, which had to previously be manually gathered from several systems, into a single source to enable proactive monitoring and control of key infrastructure. The solution would aid in the diagnosis of alarms and the underlying causes of problems, the execution of processes to prioritize situations, faster reaction times, and a decreased risk of human error. It actively provides situation-specific recommendations with a persona-optimized user experience to reduce the cognitive burden on the technician and improve uptime and service-level agreement (SLA) compliance. It also offers information on a data center site’s carbon and energy usage.
Users may safely manage a vast fleet of data centers thanks to the Honeywell Portfolio View’s integration with Data Center Manager. It would make it simple to navigate from a fleet-level view down to specific sites, producing a KPI-based score for each site that details metrics like uptime, crucial sustainability KPIs like power usage effectiveness (PUE), carbon usage effectiveness (CUE), and water usage effectiveness (WUE), space and capacity utilization, and energy consumption. To keep the C-suite informed of fleetwide performance and trends as well as specific site abnormalities, Portfolio View would also create logs and reports.
To avoid expensive downtime, data centers need uninterruptible power and reliable cooling systems. A condition-based maintenance technique is introduced by the Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance tool to find early, inherent symptoms of important asset issues before they cause system downtime. It may aid facility managers in enhancing uptime and resilience, extending the useful life of assets, and lowering maintenance and energy expenses. Users may get real-time, actionable intelligence on asset performance, pre-failure alarms, and benchmarks for zone temperature control, asset availability, energy consumption, and service case performance thanks to advanced fault-detection analytics. Additionally, remote building management may be combined with the cloud-based Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance to further give an outcome-based, service level agreement performance.
