Honeywell, Vertiv jointly offer data centre sustainability solutions

• Joint effort combines Honeywell operational technology experience with Vertiv’s critical digital infrastructure solutions to create more sustainable and efficient data centre operations

• First joint offering to combine intelligent selection of energy resources with centralised visibility of operations and infrastructure to help reduce energy use

Honeywell, which focuses on connected building solutions, and Vertiv, a critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions provider, will work together to create integrated solutions that optimise data centre sustainability, resiliency and operational performance. These solutions are expected to be available in 2020.

The partnership builds on Honeywell’s building management systems (BMS), operational software, and safety and security products along with Vertiv’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS), power distribution, thermal management, infrastructure monitoring and modular solutions to enable operators of hyperscale, large enterprise, co-location and edge data centres to integrate multiple domains of data within a data centre. The companies will leverage building-operations data to drive optimisation of operations, reducing energy use and costs while improving data centre performance and sustainability.

“Data centres face similar challenges as other buildings that have disparate systems that were not designed to work together, but they experience these challenges on a greater scale,” said Vimal Kapur, President and CEO, Honeywell Building Technologies.

“We look forward to collaborating with Vertiv to offer integrated solutions that make it easier for data centre operators to distill the mountains of data they pull from their equipment into actions that create more efficient and environmentally friendly operations.”

“Business continuity is more critical than ever, with more people working, learning and connecting remotely, driving a simultaneous explosion in data and demand for new data centres. There is need and opportunity for data centres to be more efficient, reliable and sustainable,” said Rob Johnson, CEO, Vertiv.

“Our collaboration with Honeywell will help us to collectively better serve our data centre customers. Our offerings complement each other to provide greater value to data centre operators.”

Data centres in 2018 consumed approximately 1% of the world’s energy use. While Vertiv says the industry has made great strides to reduce and offset energy demands, including increasing the utilisation of renewable energy, the company also says that more work can be done toward a more sustainable and carbon-neutral future.

The companies’ initial focus will be on microgrid solutions for data centres to enable more efficient integration of alternative energy sources such as solar arrays, fuel cells and batteries, and to provide a scalable approach for operators to quickly enhance functionality and improve total cost of ownership (TCO).

The first offering from the collaboration will be an intelligent power management solution that features an integrated energy resource management and supervisory control platform. The solution is designed to help data centres meet availability requirements while optimising energy costs, meeting corporate sustainability goals and reducing overall carbon footprint. It will also allow operators to better manage sustainability targets and account for external risk factors such as weather and grid reliability.

Combining energy storage, analytics, forecasting and economic optimisation, the solution will provide data centres with intelligent and autonomous selection of energy sources and grid services to operate a data centre load. It can also reduce energy costs while maintaining uptime requirements.

The large amount of power used for thermal management, building systems and physical security within a data centre can increase the risk of downtime. The new power management solution from Honeywell and Vertiv is designed to enable remote monitoring and maintenance, reduce costs, eliminate redundancy and improve power usage effectiveness (PUE).

Both companies own brands that provide best-in-class differentiated support to data centres. These include Honeywell’s advanced detection business featuring the VESDA brand of advanced smoke detection technology; Honeywell Forge enterprise performance management platform including Honeywell Forge Energy Optimization; Enterprise Buildings Integrator (EBI) and the Niagara Framework; and the Vertiv Liebert power and thermal management solutions, Vertiv Avocent monitoring and IT management solutions, and Vertiv Geist power distribution solutions.