08 November 2022

Honeywell has announced the launch of its Data Center Suite, a portfolio of outcome-based software solutions that help data centre managers and owners optimise uptime, worker productivity, critical asset health and operational expenses while providing better vizibility into sustainability KPIs.

Based on the open architecture Niagara Framework, it combines data from both operational technology and information technology infrastructure, securely enhancing situational awareness at site level as well as global fleet level, enabling condition-based maintenance to reduce downtime risk and operational expenses.

Given the exponentially increasing demand – as of April 2022, hyperscale operators planned to build 314 new facilities – data centre managers are often forced to do more with less, while at the same time being pressured to improve uptime, reduce costs and minimize energy consumption. User-friendly tools that automate processes can help reduce the chance for human error, which caused major outages over the last three years among 40% of organizations surveyed by the Uptime Institute, often driven by ignored or inadequate procedures. It can also help improve a data centre’s overall efficiency.

The Honeywell Data Center Suite’s tools include Data Center Manager, which integrates delivers situational site-level awareness of both OT (critical power and thermal assets) and critical IT assets data in a vendor-agnostic dashboard; Portfolio View, which enables data centre owners to monitor global network operations holistically via an on-premise tool across a fleet of data centres and make data-driven decisions to better achieve their uptime and sustainability goals; and Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance, a software-as-a-service solution that monitors data centre assets and detects early signs of anomalous intrinsic operations before it leads to potentially costly downtime.

“Demand for data storage, transfer and processing is insatiable worldwide, which makes it more challenging than ever to run and scale these facilities effectively from a design, build and operations perspective,” said Chris McLaughlin, vice president of offering management, Honeywell Building Technologies. “Honeywell is expanding its offerings in data centers to allow facility managers to derive actionable insights securely from their own data to help protect uptime, manage maintenance, reduce energy use and achieve scaling agility.”

The Data Center Manager allows proactive monitoring and management of critical infrastructure by aggregating OT and IT data – which previously had to be collected manually from disparate systems – into a single source. The solution helps operators diagnose alarms and root causes of issues, execute workflows to triage situations, improve response times and reduce human error potential. Featuring a persona-optimized user experience to minimize the technician’s cognitive load, it proactively generates situation-specific recommendations to better preserve uptime and maintain service-level agreement compliance. It also provides insights into the site’s energy and carbon use.

Portfolio View integrates with Data Center Manager to allows users to securely monitor a global fleet of data centers. It allows easy navigation from a fleet-level view down to individual sites, generating a KPI-based score for each site that profiles metrics such as uptime; critical sustainability KPIs such as power usage effectiveness (PUE), carbon usage effectiveness (CUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE); space and capacity utilization; and energy consumption. Portfolio View also generates logs and reports to keep the C-suite apprised of fleetwide performance and trends, as well as individual site anomalies.

Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance introduces a condition-based maintenance strategy to detect early, intrinsic signs of critical asset problems before it results in system downtime. It can help facility managers improve uptime and resiliency, increase asset service life, and reduce maintenance and energy costs.

Advanced fault-detection analytics provide users with real-time, actionable intelligence on asset performance, pre-failure alerts and benchmarks for zone temperature control, asset availability, energy consumption and service case performance. Additionally, the cloud-based Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance can be coupled with remote building management to further deliver an outcome-based, service level agreement performance.