Picking a Data Center Assessment Team

When you’re choosing your data center assessment team, the most important factor to consider is the team’s experience. Of course actual experience in operating data center facilities is important, as is experience in designing and configuring data centers. As a general rule, consider this: the more data center assessments that your team has performed, the better their observations and the better the solutions that they’ll recommend.

Bringing in an outside team to handle your data center assessment can provide you a breadth of experience and knowledge that an internal assessment team might not be able to provide. Granted, they’ll know your data center better but they probably won’t have seen as many other data centers and issues that go with them.

Screening your team

When you’re screening the team that will perform the assessment on your data center, make sure that you have the resumes of the team members, lists of previous client references (preferably with contact information) and three to five assessment reports from past clients.

Some of the things you’ll want to look for in an assessment report will include:

• Lists of systems and processes that they reviewed with reports of single points of failure, maintenance issues and other issues that don’t meet stated objectives
• Usable capacity statements for each system
• Prioritized recommendations for upgrades, changes and other processes
• Best practice recommendations

Getting Ready for Your Assessment

Once you’ve scheduled your assessment, be sure to schedule the appropriate staff members to work with the team doing the assessment. Make sure that the staff you assign has the appropriate experience on each system ad process so that they can work with the members of the consulting assessment team. Make sure that you also alert your key support team (electric provider, design engineer, etc) to the fact that they might be getting a phone call or two from the team.

Once you’ve prepared your team, make sure that you have all relevant documents ready (drawings, diagrams, proccedures, etc), as well as any records, studies and reports that your consulting team may need to review.

It certainly sounds like a lot of work but, when compared to the alternative of your data center falling victim to any number of issues, it quickly becomes well worth the work. If you have more questions on how we recommend you prepare for an ANTARA data center assessment, fill out our contact form here.