Data Centre Commissioning

When building a new data centre, the owner of the data centre has no guarantee that the various physical infrastructure subsystems – power, cooling, fire suppression, security, and management – will work
together. Commissioning is the process that reviews and tests the data centre’s physical infrastructure design as a holistic system in order to assure the highest level of reliability.  
 
Traditional commissioning is a daunting task. Since formal system operation doesn’t begin until the system is commissioned, the commissioning team experiences intense pressure to complete the commissioning process quickly. Commissioning can involve high expense and requires staffs from different departmental disciplines to work together. For these reasons data centre commissioning has almost uniquely been associated with large data centres (over 20,000 ft2 or 1,858 m2). In the recent past, many data centre managers chose to roll the dice and perform little or no commissioning, relying only on start-up data to press ahead with launching the new data centre. Given the reality of 24x7 operations, however, the alternative of exposure to major system failures and accompanying downtime is no longer an economically viable option. Commissioning has now become a business necessity.

Data centre commissioning can deliver an unbiased evaluation of whether a newly constructed data centre will be an operational success or a failure. Proper execution of the commissioning process is a critical step in determining how the data centre operates as an integrated system. The documentation produced as a result of commissioning is also the single, most enduring value added deliverable in a data centre’s operational life.

Failure to properly commission a data centre leaves the door wide open for expensive and disruptive downtime that could have been avoided. Integrated commissioning of all physical infrastructure components assures maximum data centre performance and justifies the physical infrastructure investment.

Click here to find out the ten most common errors that prevent successful execution of the commissioning process.