1. T
here are two business resources
that commonly see each other
as silos and as a source of blame
for inefficiencies within the Data
Centre. The delivery and maintenance of a
productive, robust and resilient IT infra-
structure relies on these resources and they
are Facilities Management (FM) and IT
Department (IT) teams. Company senior
management should deploy integrated
support also, who for ‘business sake’, need
to align themselves more closely.
The battle ground is ‘Uptime’ and the
foot soldiers for any corporate IT infrastruc-
ture are the FM and IT resource. When the
expectations of either function are not fully
appreciated or jointly executed an increase
risk in ‘down time’ is unavoidable. With
business needs driving new IT Technology
into the rack and altering the basic
performance design criteria of the data
centre a holistic managed approach is vital
to identify and correct potential risks.
Facilities Management J ournal 59
FMJ SPECIAL REPORT FM AND IT DIVIDE
In this age of stringent corporate gover-
nance responsibility and litigation savvy
clients ‘failure of IT continuity’ falls right
into the heart of the business environment.
The impact of IT failure to vital aspects of
business, for example, revenue, customer
confidence, brand reputation and share
price would be inevitable. In many cases
legal pressure would follow.
The major imperatives of reducing such
pressure in today’s corporate data centre
are security, cooling, power, productivity
and managing change. Yet FM and IT see
this from differing skill sets. For example,
cooling to FM means air-conditioning the
room and ejecting heat; for IT it’s about
environmental control, air flow, rack hot
spots and server thermal limits for rack
based equipment.
Within the working environments of FM
and IT they are both right yet today’s cool-
ing needs mean much more. It’s about high
availability, business continuity, meeting
SLA’s, brand protection and client confi-
dence. Modern servers shut down (depend-
ing on the heatload) anywhere between 10
seconds to a few minutes of the loss of
cooling within 15 minutes of a loss of
cooling. Was cooling lost because the data
centre did not have enough in-room cool-
ing capacity to service the heat load or was
the server not able to receive the appropri-
ate air volume to meet its operational
needs within the rack? Such an example
shows that joined up thinking and respon-
sibility of the issue is required across both
FM and IT to cater the ‘Uptime’ imperative.
Businesses mange critical IT processes
not just for themselves but also for their
client’s businesses. The complexities and
challenges within today’s data centers are
huge and the momentum for ever faster
change to business processes means that IT
is no longer a support service, it is at the
forefront of any business and in many
cases IT functionality is a market place
competitive edge.
The IT ‘high availability’ failure stakes
have never been more under the microscope
and the consequence of failure so high.
Who is capable of taking on these
challenges? While on a cooling theme; the
need of handling the huge thermal load
Maximum uptime and high availability is good business, so which internal corporate disjointed
parties need bringing together for the good of the businesses IT infrastructure? Derek Webster,
business development manager, Wright Line technical environment solutions, explains.
Uptime =
top ranking
Take time to find the right provider who
understands FM, IT, your busines and the
data centre
Except for clients and staff, this is your most valuable asset and likely to be you most expensive
facility per sqm
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2. 60 Facilities Management J ournal
FMJ SPECIAL REPORT FM AND IT DIVIDE
demands of today’s equipment which are
driving some data centres into deploying
such equipment as ‘liquid cooled racks’.
Who is expert enough to manage, secure
and maintain such advances, is it FM, IT or
senior management?
Who is responsible for significant IT
downtime or the breaking of an SLA?
Ultimately it is the board, yet at a func-
tional level data centre responsibility falls
at the feet of both the FM and IT troops?
These good people are specialists and do
not have the remit to blend the needs of
the physical infrastructure of the built data
centre with the in-rack IT business
processes needs of operational equipment.
So what is required? The breaking down
of internal barriers and collectively looking
‘beyond’ the technical environment. Whose
barriers need bringing together? It is a
vital triad whose collective goals should
be to support each other the business
and it’s clients. The disjointed parties are
of course facilities management, IT and
senior management.
Three world views with three skill sets.
Managements core focus are clients the
business it’s P&L and share holders.
Facilities managers is the provisioning
of business with the delivery of multi-
disciplinary services to permit the efficient,
effective performance of people and process
functions within the ‘built workplace
environment’. For IT management, it is
the delivery of digital services that permit
the efficient and effective performance of
business process and functions ‘within the
digital environment’.
Breaking the barriers that exist between
management, FM and IT functions is a
route to increased business continuity and
lower undesirable business exposures. It
can only aid the delivery of value added
services within a specific cost envelope to
maximise return on investments (ROI).
For any organisation that is a complex
form of juggling. Is your data centre
manager fluent in the language of the
three silos? Unlikely!
Modern data centres are designed from
the rack to room and not as tradition
would have it ‘room to rack’. Knowledge at
this level could well see significant yields
in the cost of real estate overhead, energy,
data centre size, performance, uptime
availability and efficiencies. The need for
corporations to understand the ‘data centre
environment’ within the implementation of
a company business case, to new infra-
structure, site or product selection has
never been so complex.
Changes of this magnitude require inte-
grated expert knowledge and management
that can bridge FM and IT people with the
need of the business at a strategic level. A
need for a bridge that is responsible to the
board/business operations, which can see
holistically what meaningful change to IT
infrastructure and its effect on the business
is and which has the capability to deliver;
increased accountability, compliance, con-
trol, business continuity for the business
and its clients, better design now and the
future, speed of response, ROI.
So what does this mean for those
responsible and involved with managing
effective crucial IT infrastructure? It means
seek a provider who is fluent in data
centre speak, who can bridge the three
differing worldviews and think beyond the
technical environment. FM and IT need to
be joint learners for a change and commu-
nicate with a holistic voice and finally for
senior management to understand the
benefits and value of seeking that expert
provider for business sake. s
“Breaking the
barriers between
management, FM
and IT functions is
a route to
increased business
continuity.”
Should this data centre infrastructure fail, impacts to business process, brand reputation, client
confidence will be felt. The Board are ultimately responsible for data and continuity
“In times of
change, learners
inherit the world,
while the learned
find themselves
beautifully
equipped to deal
with a world that
no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer (Social writer)
The right skill sets should be
working on your business critical
infrastructure. It is unlikely to be
purely FM or IT
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