Data Center Power Pack
Corso Systems has helped many companies manage their data center operations. We’ve seen a lot—from large enterprise manufacturers with on-prem servers integrated with their existing SCADA system to companies with large-scale dedicated data centers requiring advanced monitoring and control. Regardless of how many servers are in your data center, we believe transparency, technology (including automation), and training are the best tools to take your operations to the next level.
The Corso Systems Data Center Power Pack
In our experience, data centers need to focus on five key areas to optimize and maintain their facilities. We have built a set of tools any Data Center operator can use to get up and running efficiently and we have dubbed it our Data Center Power Pack. Our Data Center Power Pack focuses on the following five areas:
If you’re already doing some of these, great! If you are doing all of them, that’s even better! But, if you need help implementing them for your Data Center, you have come to the right place. We can get you up and running quickly in any or all of these areas, giving you the tools to operate your facility at full potential!
In this post, we’ll explain each aspect of the Data Center Power Pack. It is built with hardware and software any company familiar with automation can work on. You will also have full access to all of the code included with the deployment—and you own all of your data and information. We will take care of the hard work for you and get you up to speed as fast as possible!
Amp Up Your Data Center:
Book a 15-minute call with Cody Johnson to learn more about our Data Center Power Pack
No sales pitch, just a candid conversation.
Environmental Monitoring
Ambient conditions are critical for data center operation. Maintaining ideal temperature, humidity, and airflow is important to avoid equipment overheating and eventual failure.
Maintaining proper airflow through a data center is also critical for avoiding hotspots and to mitigate temperature fluctuations throughout a facility.
Corso Systems can help you collect and control important environmental factors, including:
Temperatures across your data center
Humidity
Airflow
Pressure (for highly sensitive systems with positive pressure requirements)
Run times for critical process equipment like HVAC units, Dehumidifiers, and Air Handlers
Preventative Maintenance requirements for all facility related equipment
Our Data Center Power Pack tools help to maintain ideal ambient conditions with the Ignition SCADA platform combined with sensor and equipment PLC integrations (or other data collection when available).
We include configuration, deployment, and commissioning of these systems in every Data Center Power Pack implementation.
Power Distribution and Utility Management
After ensuring an ideal environment for equipment operation, the next key consideration for every Data Center is ensuring that reliable power and other required utilities like process water are available for 24/7 operation.
Our Data Center Power Pack includes industry standard metrics like Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) to give you at-a-glance insight into the health of the facility—all with easy access for digging into any anomalies.
Power and Utility monitoring also includes measuring the status and health of your UPS and backup generators, power distribution equipment and switchgear.
If you are also integrated with solar, wind, or other renewable energy sources, their status can be tracked in the overall SCADA system, so that your team has a single interface for managing and monitoring everything they need.
Our Data Center Power Pack provides overview screens to see the health of the overall process as well as more detailed overall power distribution diagrams and Single Line diagrams showing you real-time status of all of your utilities.
Should any issues arise you can be notified by any alarms as we will discuss later in this article.
Security and Access Control
A Data Center must also maintain the highest levels of facility security. This includes access to the Data Center facility itself, along with access to equipment—usually with different levels of security required throughout.
The Two Main Categories of Data Center Security:
Access Management and Intrusion Detection
Overall Facility Security Monitoring
Access Management
Access management refers to the systems for managing employee and contractor access to the Data Center. Typically, this includes badge readers at relevant doors, with badged credentials granting or denying people access to restricted areas. The Data Center Power Pack includes full credential management capabilities for each user on your system. It can even integrate with any existing user infrastructure with identity providers.
In addition to Access Control, you need to be alerted about anomalous intrusions into the facility. Security sensors and locks integrated with the overall alarm notification system can determine when doors are opened or breached—and alert relevant personnel in real-time.
Overall Facility Security Monitoring
IP cameras can enhance an overall SCADA monitoring system—and transform your overall Data Center Monitoring System into a fully-featured security system. For an even more advanced version, we can build in event-based recording capture, alarms based on movement detected from particular cameras. It’s also possible to provide pan/tilt/zoom camera control on enabled cameras. By integrating security monitoring with your facility management system you can also generate events based on process conditions to capture footage of any events in your Data Center.
By automating access management and overall facility security you can also automatically generate access logs along with picture or video records. You can review these logs periodically to find any gaps in overall security or breaches, and address them accordingly.
Alarm Notifications
With the wealth of data you can collect for every aspect of your Data Center, including security, it's important to know about alarms during the day or night.
Our Data Center Power Pack gives you the ability to manage alarms for any datapoint in the system. This includes environmental variables, power and utility data, and security system information.
If the temperature in your facility starts rising, temperature fluctuations are greater than expected, a breaker trips unexpectedly, or you have a security breach, you and/or relevant staff can be notified in real-time via email, text, voice, or even direct push notifications to mobile devices with our Data Center Power Pack.
Never be left in the dark, and know about any important issues at your data center with our built-in alarm notification functionality.
Let’s Secure Your Data Center
Book a 15-minute call with Cody Johnson to learn more about our Data Center Power Pack
No sales pitch, just a candid conversation.
Trends, Dashboards, and Data Analysis
Once you’re able to collect data across your data center, you’ll want to be able to view it in a powerful decision making tool.
Our Data Center Power Pack includes configurable dashboards, trends, and data analysis tools for monitoring your facility from anywhere.
These screens include overall trends for any data in your system, and real-time values for any variables you are monitoring. We also include single line and overall power distribution screens so you can observe real-time system performance. All of your alarms are visible as they come in, are acknowledged, and clear once resolved.
Your monitoring system can be displayed on computers anywhere in your facility, TV displays, and/or even mobile devices. Overall security is applied to every aspect of the system, so no one can access data they aren’t allowed to see. We can integrate user permissions with your existing user management and security systems as well.
What is in the Data Center Power Pack?
The Data Center Power Pack includes the Ignition SCADA platform, layered with the process automation hardware to integrate with field devices. If you already have PLCs in your data center, we can easily integrate with them. If you don’t have PLCs we can spec out the hardware you need from our trusted partners (including US-based controls manufacturer, Opto 22), to work with all of your equipment. Plus, we can program and commission those systems for you too!
What you get with the Data Center Power Pack:
Ignition SCADA System including the Corso Systems Data Center Power Pack standardized functionality with:
Operator Interface/HMI screens
Process Historian for continuous data logging
Environmental Monitoring Tools
Power Distribution and Utility Management Functionality
A full Security and Access Control suite of tools
Alarm Notifications
Trends, Dashboards, and Data Analysis tools
Reporting capabilities
Unlimited screens, data points, and users
A database to store all your logged data and data center access, environmental, and performance information
PLC programming to support automated operation of your equipment using our standardized control libraries
Ongoing support to help you get the most from your system
Training for your team so they can manage and use all the new tools
Get Started Today!
Let’s take your Data Center to the next level. Schedule a call with Cody Johnson to learn what our Data Center Power Pack can do for you!
No sales pitch, just a candid conversation.
