Managed remote monitoring partnership

Data centers rarely operate as intended
“We’ve modelled hundreds of data centers across the world and the vast majority were not operating as intended. This is no reflection on the designers, engineers or operations people that are involved,” said Zahl Limbuwala CEO Romonet. “It’s more the case that operators have not had the tools to date to continuously benchmark and evaluate the complex behaviour of their data centers in real-time against the real world conditions.”
Metering and trend analysis do not provide this capability. Only the ability to compare the instrumented performance with the expected baseline provides the insight into whether a meter reading is good or bad. Limbuwala went on to say: “We have seen many sites with substantial operational issues despite extensive instrumentation. The problem is not data collection but ability to compare the data against an expected performance baseline.

“Romonet and Canara have identified hidden operating issues within data centers that were costing the operator hundreds of thousands of dollars per annum year and introducing risk to their service availability. Most often manifested in capacity issues, some worst-case scenarios have included sites that would not have stayed on-line under a utility failure condition because the dynamic site load was significantly higher than what was being calculated using manual methods.

Combined Canara Romonet service
One of the big benefits of this combined service is the ability to rapidly benchmark the energy and cost performance of data centers against expected performance values, taking full account of the real world conditions and constraints for each site. It is trivial to account for parameters such as resilience levels, low utilisation, climate or IT environmental range constraints using the Romonet technology.

The service is delivered as a complete subscription solution. Monitoring data is automatically processed by the system to alert Canara’s Monitoring Operations Center who are not only able to provide an early warning to operations and engineering staff, but are also able to size the issue for the operator in terms of the impact on cost, capacity or indirectly the availability of their site or relevant subsystems.

“We’ve integrated Romonet’s technology with our existing remote monitoring capability to deliver a fully managed service to data center operators where we continuously monitor and track performance against the design intent and equipment specifications. Our clients have found that a variance between this ‘expected vs actual’ performance gives them an early warning of issues that can become service impacting if left unchecked,” said Steve Cotton, Executive Chairman of Canara. “Because we overlay the real-time monitoring on top of the predictive model we’re able to see very easily when something isn’t performing as expected. From localisation and diagnosis of the fault, it is generally quite easy to continue tracking the deviation until it is completely resolved.”

Fast and low impact
Unlike traditional DCIM or EMS / BMS tools the Romonet - Canara offering is quick to implement with low impact to the site. Little or no additional metering is required as the analysis tools are able to work effectively with only high-level metering.

The subscription based model offers a zero capital cost solution for creation, calibration, and deployment of the site model, which can be completed within a few weeks and then instantly begin providing performance benchmarks and diagnosis of existing issues.

Understanding cost per load – Activity Based Costing
The cost of delivery of data center capacity is becoming more significant for both enterprise operators and service providers. The addition of Branch Circuit Monitoring for the IT loads in the data center allows for true utility energy and cost allocation to the loads, platforms or customers hosted in your data center.