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Data Center Power Systems Best Practices (2)

September 20th, 2011 by Devender Aerrabolu

Power system failures can severely hamper data center operations; extreme weather poses significant risk to a continuous power source. There are several best practices that can be utilized by IT departments to ensue maximum uptime for the data centers for their organizations. The first five were detailed earlier; the remainder will be discussed here.

1)IT departments and facilities managers can benefit by having on going monitoring and diagnostics that are enterprise-wide and proactive. Disciplined work practices and processes for software consultations and swift response actions will allow for the effective use of software for mission-critical equipment including power systems, environmental, and life and safety systems.
2)Establish and maintain contingency plans to deal with the loss of water and power. Extensive research, planning, and cost-benefit analyses should be executed to prepare for situations beyond the control of the enterprise, such as natural or man-made disasters.
3)Build redundancy into the power system topology. Although more expensive to purchase and install, data center redundancy will allow for much faster recovery after a power outage.
4)It may seem obvious, but replacing outdated equipment and UPS systems increases overall data center availability while also reducing cost of ownership to the enterprise.
5)Regular auditing of power systems by the data center managers will yield up-to-date information on the total infrastructure of mission-critical equipment capacity.

IT departments and facilities management engineers, working together, can help to mitigate power system downtimes by cooperatively establishing best practices for modern data center infrastructures.

Posted in Business Processes, Change Log Management, Engineering Change Management, Inspection Management | No Comments »

Data Center Power Systems: Best Practices (1)

September 6th, 2011 by Devender Aerrabolu

The recent extreme weather in many parts of the United States in the spring and summer of 2011 resulted in many IT department re-evaluating the power systems of their critical data centers.

There are several best practices that can be utilized by IT departments to ensue maximum uptime for the data centers for their organizations. The first five will be outlined here; the remainder will be discussed in a later post.

1)Because of the increased capacity of most server infrastructures, including the adoption of blade servers and virtualization, power overloads are much more common. Companies should have established written document for practices and procedures to allow IT departments and facilities managers to work together to for data center power systems management and maintenance.
2)Data center new construction or renovation projects should emphasize long-term value over short-term costs; including rewards for construction teams that have long-term views for their procurement procedures.
3)IT departments should, along with the facilities departments, standardize uniform maintenance processes using the definition of frameworks such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL. Adoption of uniform standards will allow for better control over the assets of the IT departments and proactive maintenance for less downtime.
4)IT departments can also work with the facilities engineers to establish a comprehensive change management database (CMDB) to assist in the rapid resolution of emergency situations and to ensure continuity in processes.
5)Data center availability should be measured in both reliability—the mean time between system failures (MTBF), and the MTTR, or the mean time required to repair the system.

IT departments and facilities management engineers, working together, can help to mitigate power system downtimes by cooperatively establishing best practices.

Posted in Business Processes, Engineering Change Management, Inspection Management | No Comments »

Inspection Management and Quality Control for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

December 22nd, 2009 by Bill Martin

One thing that we at American Unit have discovered as a result of our work with many manufacturing enterprises is that most modern quality control programs continue to rely on inspection management systems to ensure product and process quality. As a Microsoft Dynamics NAV solutions provider, we have viewed the lack of that specific functionality in the NAV platform as both a challenge and an opportunity. To that end, as part of our investment in building a unique vertical solution for manufacturing, we have developed a new add-on module for Dynamics NAV to address this gap in the solution. Our application, Inspection Management and Quality Control for Microsoft Dynamics NAV addresses the constant pressure on manufacturers to reach increasingly higher levels of quality.

Working seamlessly with Dynamics NAV, our solution delivers key process benefits that include more accurate inventory listing with individual item inspection information, reduced sampling time, automatic routing of rejected items back to vendor, reduced shop floor scrap, and use of historical vendor quality data to select the appropriate supplier for specific items.

As an example, Item Inspection using Inspection Management in Microsoft Dynamics involves the measurements, tests, applied to certain parameters in regards to an item with or without sampling techniques and skip logic rule. Inspection processes are determined by various characteristics including the timing, duration, and intensity of the collections and the details of the past processing treatment. Poor choices of these Inspection parameters can lead to poor Inspection performance. Proper choices of these parameters can make it easier to integrate the various Inspections into the overall service process. An Inspection is the use of a measurement in an intelligent fashion to drive some corrective action. Inspection might be one of shape, size, or even weight. Inspections need not be restricted to product characteristics.

The following screen shows inspection list that needs to be inspected and created automatically at the time of received.

Vendor quality performance is useful to determine the appropriate vendor for an item. This is a statistical measurement and it uses historic information. The following screen shows item wise vendor quality performance.