Data centers are the foundation of technological progress; they store information and make it accessible for use by a wide range of industries. Currently, it’s more important than ever to reduce outages, downtime, and security risks as much as possible. To ensure your data center is reliable, efficient, and better protected from data breaches and attacks, a robust maintenance program is imperative.

What is Data Center Maintenance?

Simply put, data center maintenance is a series of proactive, preventive, and predictive measures to identify issues that can lead to system failures. It’s a holistic approach to maintaining the entire facility. It involves monitoring assets for repairs and maintaining an inventory of spare parts to ensure key infrastructure consistently remains operational, in turn minimizing unplanned downtime.

Investing in generators, backup cooling devices, batteries, and redundancy systems are all ways to reduce downtime. Additionally, investing in a quality maintenance program using industry-standard best practices will elevate your data center’s reliability to the next level. Below are seven of the best practices you can implement in your data center maintenance plan.

1. Be Proactive With Preventive Maintenance

Staying on top of maintenance is crucial to minimizing common issues data centers frequently encounter. However, manually scheduling and running routine preventive maintenance tasks can be time consuming and resource intensive. There isn’t a ubiquitous approach to preventive maintenance for data centers, but there are four commonly defined categories:

  • Periodic Maintenance: involves scheduling maintenance checks and tasks at set intervals in a calendar year. This is the most basic level of maintenance and should be incorporated into any preventive program.
  • Meter-Based Maintenance: Uses a metering system to indicate when a data center asset requires maintenance. Essentially, the system is comprised of automated time-based triggers that indicate when a machine, part, system, or other asset requires attention.
  • Predictive Maintenance: Uses monitoring devices to detect inconsistencies or aberrations in a system to signal a work order is needed for maintenance.
  • Prescriptive Maintenance: Similar to the predictive approach but incorporates historical data to anticipate maintenance needs.

2. Keep Your Resources Operational With Asset Management

Data centers are comprised of a complex interconnected network of assets, which include servers, networking equipment, storage devices, and other essential hardware pieces. The ability to quickly and efficiently replace parts and assets helps reduce instances of unplanned downtime. Having a virtual parts storeroom is an efficient way to take advantage of global, multi-site, spare parts distribution by cataloguing and sharing the precise location of parts and assets. This is a great resource for routine maintenance but is especially helpful for emergencies.

3. Manage Your Vendors and Hold Them Accountable

Another aspect of asset management is original equipment manufacturer (OEM) accountability. Often, data center asset manufacturers have service, warranty, and other agreements related to product maintenance. Typically, this involves external contractors entering your facility to perform maintenance tasks. Adding an OEM portal into your maintenance tracking platform will help keep vendors accountable for work order tickets and enable you to monitor access to sensitive areas of your data center.

4. Sustain a Quality Spare Parts Inventory

It’s hard to maintain your data center assets without a well-stocked inventory of spare parts. For medium- to large-sized data centers, spare parts access is critical. Investing in spare parts and incorporating a system for tracking and monitoring their use will help reduce work order times and maximize uptime.

5. Utilize Work Order Management to Carry Out Tasks

Work order management involves putting systems in place for organizing and controlling maintenance tasks. It encompasses submitting tickets, establishing the scope of work, scheduling, delegating tasks, completing work, and recording outcomes. Quality work order management seeks to optimize resources while fulfilling maintenance tasks.

6. Rely on Reporting Analytics

Since data centers are directly tied to a business or organization’s revenue, having accurate and up-to-date reporting analytics is an important element of any maintenance program. The key performance indicators (KPIs) will vary across facilities based on the clients they serve. Identifying your system’s KPIs will inform you when assets are underperforming or need maintenance. If you take a predictive or prescriptive approach to preventive maintenance, precise and timely reports on asset performance are essential.

7. Remain Up to Date With Compliance and Regulations

Regulatory compliance issues can be severely problematic; Sometimes, they can even force your data center offline. Since data centers handle vast amounts of sensitive personal, financial, and medical information, there are numerous compliance guidelines and standards set to protect people’s data. The primary compliance standards for data centers are:

  • ISO/IEC 27001
  • SSAE 18
  • PCI DSS
  • HIPAA
  • FISMA
  • GDPR

You can expect periodic audits of your data center by any of the agencies that monitor and facilitate the above statutes. Running your own compliance audits will offer transparency to regulatory bodies. Also, storing this information in the cloud, where it’s always accessible, enables you to be audit-ready 24/7.

8. Monitor Consumption With Energy Management

Monitoring power consumption is more than an effort to meet sustainability goals and metrics. While reducing energy usage is an admirable goal, energy management has other benefits for your data center. Power issues were responsible for roughly 52% of data center downtime in 2023. Additionally, surges and voltage sags can unnecessarily wear down equipment. By integrating power monitors into your reporting and analytics systems, you can monitor energy usage and make critical decisions to extend asset life and reduce outages.

Centralizing Data Center Maintenance

Data center maintenance can be efficiently managed by a dedicated team, but computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) simplify and automate maintenance. All the best practices mentioned can be integrated into a CMMS so that all your maintenance information, tools, ticketing, and more are centralized and therefore universally accessible.

eMaint has proven itself as a leading CMMS solution. It offers customizable configurations for your data center’s needs while maintaining ease-of-use. Additionally, eMaint is a mobile-first CMMS app, which means you do not have to be onsite to monitor, manage, or execute maintenance orders at your data center.