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While the importance of keeping a data center running around the clock without interruptions is obvious to the data center manager, it may not be as obvious to the staff responsible for maintaining that data center’s supporting infrastructure.

Gary Westaway, who ran data center operations for Sears Canada for the past 35 years, said it is up to the data center manager to change this. Westaway, now a Dell data center manager, spoke at DatacenterDynamics Toronto on Monday.

He said in an interview that it was the data center manager’s job to build a partnership with the facilities team. Each side has a distinct set of expertise, both of which should be leveraged to meet the business needs the data center supports.

The data center, on most facilities teams’ lists, is only one of the items of concern.

“The facilities people often are looking after multiple buildings and – unless you’re an IBM or something like that – your facilities people likely know very little [more than] zero about the true nature of the data center,” Westaway said. “To them it’s no more important than the office building.”

At Sears, Westaway said, the data center team had to do a lot of education over a long period of time to drive the importance of avoiding outages. “They didn’t understand [that] without all that hardware there’s no reason to have all the office people there.”

The job of ensuring that the facilities staff understand the importance of the data center never really ends, as team members leave and new ones come on board. Westaway said every new facilities manager that joined had to be “broken in.”

Maintaining an electrical and mechanical infrastructure that supports a data center is a lot more demanding than maintaining one that supports an office building.

The key difference is in the amount and level of inspection that needs to be done for every critical component, Westaway said, as the threshold of unacceptability is much lower in the data center than in an office environment.

The critical components include CRAC/CRAH equipment, UPS systems and batteries, generators, transformers, automatic transfer switches and diesel fuel tanks.

“The facilities people may look at it and say, ‘It’s not perfect but … it’s good enough,’” he said. “In the world of ‘five nines’ availability, ‘good enough’ doesn’t really cut it.”