The skillset of operators, technicians and engineers who monitor and ensure the availability of data centre play a vital role. “What we have done is, incidents keep happening in any scenario how fast and effectively can the team restore the services. In order to develop that culture we have created a mock drill scenario,” said Shankar KM, Associate Director, Data Centre Operations, STT GDC India.
He further explained that their organisation has created scenario based mock drills for example triggering some critical alerts in the system for example CCTV camera failure or power failure or PDU failure.
Various scenarios are created, some of which are informed and some are uninformed. It is seen how fast the team is able to resolve the incident. The demands from the customers are high from availability and relicieny point of view. In this regard developing the skill set is important as no matter what the data centre is fully or semi automated as human intervention is important.
Role of Automation
Automation plays a major role. But how does one achieve automation? In India, power stability is one of the major challenges and in order to mitigate this. Everything should be automated. If any power interruption takes place right from starting the diesel generator to extending power to the PDUs and UPS everything should be seamless.
“In the legacy data centre we know the level of difficulty we face in integrating automation. We have done some of the automation of the electrical control systems and mechanical control systems; everything is integrated in the building management system. We have witnessed that the experience is amazing after automation and human intervention is nullified. In that way we can guarantee the customers of constant availability,” added Shankar KM. The pandemic has increased the demands from the customers.
In its eleventh annual Global Data centre Survey, Uptime Institute announced the release of its the largest and comprehensive findings in the digital critical infrastructure space.
The findings showcase an industry enjoying widespread growth while adapting to increasing complexity and challenges such as evolving efficiency and sustainability requirements, rising outage costs, the ongoing workforce shortage, supply chain interruptions and other issues.
The findings pointed out that staffing shortages continue and AI is not expected to reduce requirements in the near future. As the sector continues to grow, the shortage of qualified data centre professionals continues.
Nearly half of owners and operators surveyed report difficulty finding skilled candidates, up from 38 per cent in 2018. As such, it is clear why 75 per cent of respondents believe that most data centre professionals have long-term job security.
Three out of four owners and operators believe artificial intelligence (AI) will reduce their data centre staffing needs at some point, but half project this shift is more than five years away.
