Mission-Critical Facilities Management

The intended audience for this book is the business manager, supervisor or executive that must manage mission-critical facilities, especially data centers or colocation facilities. Another audience that will find this useful is facilities management and technical staff who want to transition to the mission-critical business.This book will also be extremely valuable for managers and executives involved in business resilience or continuity, who rely on colocation facilities and cloud computing for their enterprise IT business needs and internet presence. Finally, this book is written as “the little black book,” a resource to which you can refer, when you need to get quickly up to speed on a subject. The chapters are designed for overall views, and the index at the back of the book can be used to quickly zero-in on a specific type of asset. If you need to get a quick overview of an entire system before a technical discussion, read the entire chapter on the particular area- written to be just long enough to get the ideas across- and you’ll be primed to go.As a wise man said, “You don’t have to know all the right answers to be a good engineer; you have to know where to look for the right answers.” This has them.If you're an executive of a big company in your given business sector- CIO, CTO, CFO- you have significant investments and reliance upon Information Technology. It's NOT a competitive advantage, it's just a necessity of modern businesses.But if IT is not part of your core business, the logical solution to is to avoid sunk costs and utilize a datacenter/colocation facility. It removes sunk costs, allows you to scale quickly, and the costs vary with your needs. As well, it would appear you've eliminated or mitigated the downtime risks, by outsourcing this function to the experts, right? The datacenter/colocation provider shows you a SOC-2 certificate, that "demonstrates" they're properly maintaining their critical infrastructure, thereby protecting your company with superb performance.At least that's the idea. With >800 audits of critical facilities in the past six years, supporting IT equipment, data and records >$40 TRILLION, I can categorically state that SOC-2 certificates that datacenter/colocation vendors offer clients is actually worthless. You MAY unknowingly be exposed to outage risks, with no advocates to represent your company, the IT client.I show with direct professional experience why this is the case, describing what I have seen, and describe what has been successfully deployed to bridge this gap, and protect YOU, the IT client.If you own data centers, this book will allow you to:Learn the secrets to successfully operating mission-critical facilities.Learn about the people, policies, procedures and strategic planning.Step-by-step discussion of data center support systems, the pros and cons of each approach, including:GeneratorsUPS SystemsBasic SwitchgearCooling SystemsBatteriesBuilding Design and LocationSecurity MeasuresRisk MitigationExamples of real-world systems, putting it all togetherStrategic management and planning issuesFinancial aspects- build vs buy, OPEX and CAPEX models, costs vs Tier Levels Read more