DC Professional Development

This course will help the student understand the most important design considerations of a mission critical data center, including: risk tolerance, reliability, maintainability, and proactive preventative maintenance.

This course will give students an understanding of downtime and the associated risks involved, as well as common causes. Practical tools will also be introduced to assist students in developing testing/commissioning policies, operations documentation and training procedures to reduce human error.

This course examines the maintenance of electrical systems and distribution equipment which are integral to ensuring continuous power to a critical infrastructure. Students will also explore the importance of how standards and regulations affect electrical maintenance safety, as well as how to choose the right maintenance approach.

All power is not created equal and poor power quality can put undue wear and tear on computers, data, and mission critical infrastructure. In this course, students will gain an insight into power quality and its impact on a facility, how to troubleshoot possible power problems, power monitoring, and the tolerances of computer equipment.

There is no doubt that Uninterruptible Power Systems are integral to the continuous supply of clean power for mission critical infrastructure. In order to understand the UPS systems and their influence on reliability, students will get an overview of UPS terminology, concepts of integrating various types of UPS systems, redundancy configuration, batteries, and energy storage systems.

A Static Transfer Switch (STS) is critical to any redundant power system supplying data center loads. In the event of a power loss, switching to an alternate source of power without dropping the load is vital. In order to understand the importance of STS’, an in-depth look at the major components, parameters, common locations, maintenance, and testing is required.

During a power interruption, the ability to transfer the power load to an emergency source via an Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) is of utmost importance to any facilities manager, especially when concerned with life safety and the availability of critical systems. A detailed view of ATS’ and their features, requirements, control devices, uses, and safety regulations are presented to foster better understanding of ATS’ and their relation to safety and reliability.

In an age where emergency preparedness is increasingly subject to public scrutiny, standby power has become a necessity. In addition, planning, emergency procedures and nonlinear load problems are important to the overall implementation and maintenance of an effective standby power system. This course covers all of the above, as well as the roles of management and users in an effective implementation.

Fuel quality is crucial to generator performance. Proper maintenance of fuel oil systems will assure good fuel quality and integrity thereby optimizing the reliability, service life, and performance of the engine generator. In addition to learning about proper fuel oil maintenance, design of fuel systems, proper testing and storage of fuel will also be discussed with the appropriate application of codes and standards.

An introduction to fire detection, alarm and suppression within critical environments...

A raised access floor creates a space between the floor slab and the underside of the access floor and provides space for building services such as air conditioning, fire detection and suppression, security and cabling for electric power, data, telecom/voice, and environmental control, to name a few. Design considerations with respect to loads, air flow requirements, safety concerns and others will be discussed as well as panel cutting and floor maintenance.

A main requirement to consider in mission critical designs, servers and other electronic components exhaust massive amounts of heat during normal operation which must be cooled or risk overheating, which can seriously threaten the integrity of data and extensive damage to equipment. This module will address best practices in the design and operations of cooling systems in the data center.

This course module covers the advanced topics within the discipline of data center cooling; solutions that are designed for state or the art high density data center deployments, high performance computing, as well efficiency driven solutions such as fresh air cooling.

This course module looks at business continuity and how current regulations and policies impact the way organizations must operate with regard to data integrity, availability, and disaster recovery. The course also discusses the growing drive for energy efficiency and carbon regulation.

This course reviews the various airflow management strategies in use today so that students can understand the challenges caused by increasing thermal densities and the need for thermal control in a data center environment. Also discussed are the effects of sensible and latent cooling on efficiency and capacity.

This course focuses on Energy Security by discussing the potential of distributed generation, smart security and the Smart Grid, with particular relevance to the mission critical sector.