"Data centers face similar challenges to other buildings with disparate systems that weren't designed to work together, but they experience these challenges on a much larger scale," explains Vimal Kapur, president and CEO of Honeywell Building Technologies. "The collaboration with Vertiv allows us to look to the future and offer integrated building solutions, enabling data center operators to simplify the vast amounts of information extracted from their equipment and translate it into actions that lead to more efficient and environmentally friendly operations.".
“Business continuity is more critical than ever, with more people working, studying, and connecting remotely, which has driven a simultaneous explosion of data and demand for new data centers. There is both a need and an opportunity for data centers to be more efficient, reliable, and sustainable,” said Rob Johnson, CEO of Vertiv. “Our collaboration with Honeywell will help us collectively better serve our data center customers. Our offerings complement each other to provide greater value to data center operators.”.
The initial focus of companies will be on microgrid solutions for data centers, enabling more efficient integration of alternative energy sources such as solar panels, fuel cells, and batteries, to provide a scalable approach with the goal of enabling operators to quickly improve functionality and total cost of ownership.
The first solution resulting from the collaboration will be an intelligent energy management solution that includes an energy resource management and supervisory control system on a single, integrated platform. Combining energy storage, analytics, forecasting, and economic optimization, the solution will provide data centers with intelligent and autonomous selection of energy sources and grid services to operate their loads and reduce energy costs while maintaining uptime requirements. The solution can also help data centers meet availability requirements while optimizing energy costs, meeting corporate sustainability goals, and reducing their global carbon footprint. It will also enable operators to better manage sustainability objectives and account for external risk factors such as weather and grid reliability.
The large amount of energy used for precision cooling, building systems, and physical security within a data center can increase the risk of downtime. Honeywell and Vertiv's new scalable and easy-to-deploy smart energy management solution is designed to enable remote monitoring and maintenance, reduce costs, eliminate redundancy, and improve power usage effectiveness (PUE).
The combined companies include Honeywell's advanced detection solutions under the VESDA brand, advanced smoke detection technology, Honeywell Forge's enterprise performance management platform, Honeywell Forge energy optimization, the Enterprise Building Integrator (EBI) system and Niagara system, as well as Vertiv Liebert's energy and thermal management solutions, Vertiv Avocent's IT monitoring and management solutions and Vertiv Geist's power distribution solutions.
