One of the most interesting aspects of working at RF Code is learning just how varied the average data center operator's day is. We deal with people across every business function, from executives managing the strategic direction of a global IT estate, to a regional data center professional validating the benefits of their recent cooling upgrade.
We also hear a fair share of ‘confessions’ – i.e. the water cooler challenges that data center managers have to overcome on a daily basis. Often our customers come to us with problems (or even disasters) to solve that they wouldn’t want their management or the public hearing about. In this new blog series we discuss customer experiences and how we helped save the day - with all names and confidential information kept a secret of course.
One of the more recent anecdotes comes courtesy of a global colocation provider.
The team we spoke to were tasked with conducting an Integrated Systems Test (IST) for a new hall in one of their legacy facilities.
Why? Well, for those unfamiliar with ISTs, it was essential that the location had the necessary resilience and redundancy to cope with disaster scenarios, especially if customers were to start relying on the service for their mission-critical applications and content.
The manager’s initial choice was going to be data loggers, which would record the relevant data during the test and then enable the team to assess the results.
Unsurprisingly, this ‘test, assess, retest’ procedure was very time-consuming and inefficient. What the team really required was the ability to understand the effects of any adjustments in real-time.
Sometimes data center management teams are so used to the status quo, they need a little guidance in how they can improve their working practices. We were happy to help and suggested a new option – real-time temperature and humidity monitoring.
This worked wonders, though much to the dismay of the team in question! The visibility provided by RF Code’s solution showed that the room was actually failing. As you would expect, the team halted their testing, began to evaluate which infrastructure wasn’t fit for purpose and attempted to understand which adjustments were needed.
Suffice to say, the company’s CFO was unhappy when the data center team came to the conclusion that they would have to redesign the room at a high capital expense. In fact, so was the CIO. He was suddenly faced with a behind schedule IT hall that would have a negative impact on available capacity.
Thankfully for the sake of the data center manager, the next time we met at an industry event, he still had a job. His team had rectified the issues and he was actually grateful for what our solution uncovered. If the company had not used RF Code to discover the underlying issues, they would likely have gone live for customer use and the outcomes could have been significantly worse.
