point

Predictive Maintenance vs Reactive Maintenance

Nikhil Pathak
Vice-President, India and SAARC-Schneider Electric IT Business
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Nikhil Pathak
Headquartered in Bangalore, Schneider Electric India offers operations and management of physical assets of data centers to help customers increase operational efficiency, minimize downtime, reduce energy costs, and optimize the life of IT equipment.



IT service management is about process, where both virtualization and data center infrastructure management rely on processes. DCIM enforces processes for capacity planning, server refreshes, data center access, migrations and consolidations. As we have progressed, data centers have become large enough and server density has increased. The greatest challenge today is to optimize the cost. So apart from being a cost center, the focus is also on being a profit center. Schneider Electric India is helping enterprises make the most efficient use of the infrastructure which they already have and reducing their Operational Expenditure (OPEX). We offer complete operations and management to help customers increase operational efficiency, reduce cost and optimize infrastructure.

Minimizing Operational Expenditure

The current trend in IT, embodied particularly in cloud computing, is a move towards centralization of computing power. Mobile mania and a "rental society" has driven cloud computing and pay-as-you-go services from large providers, creating numerous threats such as the potential for cascading failures as well as vast repositories of private data. The challenge for the CIOs specific to datacenter is how they optimize on cost. It is not only the CAPEX that is the one time cost; most important is the cost of ownership which also includes OPEX. So the biggest challenge is how to manage this OPEX more efficiently and more effectively. When we look at global data, it says that 70 percent of outage of a datacenter happens because of human error, non-compliance to the standard operating procedure and lack of maintenance. Schneider believes in predictive maintenance instead of reactive maintenance to deal with this problem. The ultimate goal of predictive maintenance is to perform maintenance at a scheduled point in time when the maintenance activity is most cost-effective and before the equipment loses performance within a threshold. The strength lies in the data. We have to know what the data tells us, how the critical infrastructure is operating, through the health checks and from that we say that here is a likely failure to happen.


Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook