The Data Centre Operations Team
- Leadership criteria and attributes
- How to set-up up an efficient and effective facility management operations team structure
- Defining roles, responsibilities and skill metrics
- Key Performance Objectives (KPO) and appraisals
- Job rotation, reward, promotion and succession planning as strategies to grow and retain talent
- Training and assessments
- Shift management, scheduling and roster planning
Vendor Management
- Vendor selection and qualification
- Managing risk and dealing with non-compliance, public liability, legal, escalation and complaint procedures
- Key considerations of a vendor agreement for services
- Performance measurement and reporting
Facilities Maintenance
- Maintenance options
- Main considerations for maintenance agreements
- The practicality in deciding between comprehensive/non- comprehensive maintenance regimes
- Warranty pitfalls
- Service reports alignments with maintenance agreements
- Tiered maintenance considerations
- Preventive, Predictive, Condition and Reliability Centred (RCM) based maintenance
- Managing on-site/off-sites spares and how to determine which spares to keep on-site
Managing Safety & Statutory Requirements
- Statutory and industry compliance/regulations
- Emergency response and safety policies and procedures
- PTW (Permit To Work) requirements and procedures
- General rules and regulations for the data centre
- Ergonomic workspace SOPs for a power outage, fire, bomb threat etc.
Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management
- Defining the data centre design limitations
- Defining measurement criteria and reporting
- Alignment of business SLA with vendor SLA
- Defining chance management procedure for installation and de-installation of new equipment
- Reporting and escalation management
Managing Physical Security
- Guidelines from standards; ANSI/TIA-942, ISO/IEC- 27001/02, SS507
- SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) in managing day to day security access control, such as:
- Entry/exit control and access management
- Permit-To-Work (PTW) and contractor work in progress
- Delivery of goods
- Customer access
- Etc.
- Effective patrols routing and how to ensure 24×7 vigilance
- Handling external threats; crisis/emergencies
- Security incident management
Managing Daily Data Centre Operations/Floor Management
- ITSM/ITIL (IT service management) in the data centre
- Shift hand-over requirements and procedures
- Asset and inventory management for hardware, software, spares, consumables, etc.
- Floor management procedures and duties such as rack space allocations, management of installers
- Pre-installation analysis for power, cooling, weight, EMF, fire protection and other influencing factors
- From truck to rack
- Handling of incoming equipment
- Inspection, unpacking and security procedures
- Staging procedure and requirements
- Equipment movement into the computer room
- Finishing up the installation
- De-installation/commissioning procedures
Capacity Management
- Defining the design limits of the data centre
- Setting up thresholds, monitoring and reporting
- Business review and future capacity planning
- Technical solutions aiding capacity planning such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), capacity and configuration management solutions
Cable Management
- Overview of ANSI/TIA-942, ANSI/TIA-606 requirements
- Cabling specification & labelling based on ANSI/TIA-606 In-rack power and network cabling
- Labelling requirements
- Cabling/cable tray layout documentation
Data Centre Cleaning and Pest Control
- Types of pollution found in data centres such as H2S, air-particulates etc.
- Common causes of pollution in the data centre
- Standards, policies and techniques to reduce and clean up dust, pests and other pollution and disturbances
Data Centre Monitoring and Automation
- Data centre monitoring requirements
- Threshold setting and reporting requirements
- Notification and escalation requirements
- Automated 24hrs helpdesk ticketing systems
- Incident and customer complaint management & change management
- Performance measurement and monitoring requirements such as fuel and water consumption, PUE/DCiE etc.
Managing Documentations/Archives
- Document management standards
- Document management process requirements
- Minimum and desired design documentation set
- Operational management documents
Equipment Lifecycle Management
- Policies and procedures governing life cycle management
- Asset management including software and firmware
- Service situations
- Review, triggers and reporting
- Test life cycle