Mission Critical - Winter 2008 - (Page 12)

Digital Power BY PETER M. CURTIS Peter Curtis is the president of Power Management Concepts, LLC, in Woodbury, NY, and an Associate Professor at New York Institute of Technology. The Next Edge in Business Resiliency Documentation and training can form the competitive advantage business leaders want S pending millions of dollars on business resilien- ing a comprehensive documentation and training program cy and reliability is a good start, especially when to complement it? As equipment reliability increases and best practices an organization can lose a great deal of money if downtime occurs at the precise wrong processing moment. mainstream, an increasing percentage of downtime results Investing in and installing new equipment does not from actions taken by inadequately trained personnel or staff that lacks access to accurate, guarantee reliability and facility infraup-to-date comprehensive data durstructure health. To maintain the edge Why bother with ing critical events. Keeping on-site in business resiliency in today’s misstaff motivated, trained, and ready to sion critical environment, the reliability major investments respond to emergencies is a challenge, model needs to include capital dollars in a robust facility made even greater challenge without an for critical infrastructure plus ongoing without implementing appropriate program in place. funding for documentation and trainYears ago the typical organizations ing that addresses the operational risks a comprehensive relied heavily on its workforce to retain associated with critical environments. documentation and much of the information regarding misSince human error accounts for at least training program to sion critical systems. Many of these half of all downtime, prudence sugemployees had similar levels of expergests that it make sense/cents to fund compliment it? tise, and they remained with one comdocumentation and training. These propany for decades. Therefore, creating grams are essential to achieving and maintaining optimum levels of reliability. Why bother with and maintaining a fluid and living document repository for major investments in a robust facility without implement- critical infrastructure took a low priority. Today it takes three months or more to find qualified engineering staff to operate a critical facility, and at least another three to six months before the new engineer becomes familiar with the corporate culture and complex infrastructure. Without relevant documentation, how does an organization plan to teach this engineer the critical system essentials? Furthermore, what are the operational risks associated with the lack of knowledge? Diverse mission critical system configurations and applications severely hinder the ability of employees to fully understand and master all necessary equipment and learn all the information required to keep that equipment running. Engineers and operators can no longer be asked to acquire their knowledge of increasingly sophisticated power supply and distribution technology from “on the job training.” Such training proves woefully inadequate in time of crisis, because of gaps in the knowledge of the employee who learns about a system so haphazardly. Instead, a clear plan must be put into place to develop a critical document Winter 2008 12 | Mission Critical

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Mission Critical - Winter 2008

Mission Critical - Winter 2008 Table of Contents Editorial: What Have We Been Doing? Cronin’s Workshop: Imagining the Perfect Data Center Power And Cooling Solution Digital Power: The Next Edge in Business Resiliency Zinc Whiskers: Keeping Up With The Green Movement Mission Critical Care: Shipping, Staging, and Installation Legal Perspectives: “A Reliable Energy Supply Is Key to Data Center Success” Continued Payback, Instant Protection Beyond the Nines The Green Information Technology Revolution Health Care Network Offers Glimpse of the Future of Backup Power High-Density Data Centers – Discuss, Design, Deploy High Performance Data Centers Call for Innovative Cooling Techniques More Data in the Data Center Five Considerations for Powering Data Center Racks New Products Industry News Events Classifieds Letters Ad Index Datacenter Wiki: wiki-Mission Critical

Mission Critical - Winter 2008

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