7 Tips for Managing Preventative Maintenance at Data Center

In today’s world data is growing fastly. With the advancement in technology, storing, accessing, and retrieving of data is also increased. Prevention and security of data have become a big issue, so to store, retrieve, and access data, different devices are placed at a centralized location known as a data center.

Why Is the Maintenance of the Data Center Important?

Due to loads of data, there are high chances of your data center shutting down. Shutting down of data center does not just affect the accessibility, but, it is very costly. According to recent research, approximately $5600 is a cost of 1-minute downtime of the data center. These downtimes are costing millions of dollars to big facilities. So, on-time maintenance of data centers is very crucial to avoid spending the extra dollar and to avoid interaction in storing, accessing, and retrieving data.

What Is Preventative Maintenance?

Preventative maintenance is the process to ensure the minimum amount of equipment shut down and failures. Preventive maintenance conduct scheduled analyses to catch the defect before occurring. To save data center from failure, preventive maintenance is performed. The following are the 7 tips to make preventive maintenance more effective for data centers.

Safety of the Technician

The first and very critical step of preventive maintenance is to ensure the safety of the technician while executing preventive maintenance. Before letting any technician perform preventive maintenance, they should be given security training. They should be trained to save themselves in emergency conditions.

Regular Maintenance

Most of the shutdowns and failures in data centers happen because of batteries and ups failure. So the very crucial factor of preventative maintenance is to keep a check of ups and batteries regularly. Regular maintenance of equipment will not just reduce failure, but will also help in increasing the equipment lifetime. Preventive maintenance also helps in managing power usage and energy consumption.

Make a Checklist

Before assigning work to any technician, you need to make a standard checklist mentioning the duties. So that every time a technician performs preventive maintenance, he knows what to do. This checklist will even help you in the long term.No matter which the technician is performing preventive maintenance, the procedure will always be the same. In the case of the data center, the standard checklists are named SOP, MOP, and EOP.

Perform PM Compliance

After estimating the total cost required on 1 minute shut down of the data center, it is very necessary to perform preventive maintenance on time. To measure whether or not your preventive maintenance is on time, the best way is to produce PM compliance. You must wonder what PM compliance is? PM compliance is defined as the process to measure in what percentage the scheduled task of preventive maintenance is performed. If the task is executing as per the schedule, then your preventive maintenance will be successful.

Keep Your Documentation Ready All the Time

Documentation is very significant to keep track of things. Incomplete documentation can lead to bigger issues to the data center manager in case of emergency or failure. Another benefit of the complete documentation of preventive maintenance is that it will help auditors in the inspection. So making the documentation available for the auditors, complete it regularly. Similarly, the documentation can be used to reduce the failure and shut downtime of equipment.

Measure Your Performance

It is said that if you can measure anything, you can not improve it. So measuring the performance of preventive maintenance is very crucial. You can measure the performance using the KPIs.There are so many KPIs which include preventive maintenance compliance, accessibility, and reliability. You can design your preventive maintenance in a way that it performs better but at less cost.

Get Yourself a CMMS

Below are the thoughts of the author and do not represent Colocation America

You can measure maintenance using the different android app and software. The most reliable way of keeping track of preventive maintenance is the Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS).

CMMS not only keep a track of preventive maintenance but also help in improving it by using the above tips. Using the CMMS, the staff members can keep a track of maintenance and cost. It can help in improving the lifetime of the data centers, equipment, and improving productivity. It is also useful for technicians to keep track of equipment maintenance data, order history, and much more.

Data centers are very useful in today’s world for storing, retrieving, and accessing data. But failures and downtimes are the most common problems and challenges in data centers. So to keep it working, it is important to prevent it from failure because recovery of failure can cost a large amount. So to prevent data centers from shut down or failure, preventive maintenance is used. It is very important to perform effective preventive maintenance to ensure improvement and minimize failure. Using the above techniques, you can make your preventive maintenance more effective.