Honeywell launches new tools to manage data centre resources, downtimes

Honeywell, the US-based aerospace and technology services firm, has announced the launch of its Data Centre Suite. The 'suite' of products include tools that seeks to offer a single-window portal for management of data center resources, performance of various aspects of data centre infrastructure, management of power consumption and sustainability in data centre operations, and handle maintenance of data centres to ensure minimal downtime of resources.

Honeywell claims that its suite is agnostic to any vendor providing the data centre suite and storage products. Among its offerings is 'Forge Digitized Maintenance' — a software as a service (SaaS) offering that can analyze the status of data centre storage and network infrastructure. According to the company, this can help analyze any issues with the operational technology (OT) infrastructure of data centre parks, thereby preventing potential outages and downtimes.

The launch comes as the demand for data centers have steadily grown in India and globally. Domestic data center demand, according to an August 4 report on the matter by industry body Assocham and consultancy firm EY India, is tipped to grow to $8 billion by 2026 — nearly double of the estimated value of $4.4 billion that India's data centre industry had peaked in 2020.

This has been visible in the increasing volume of investments being made by companies, to set-up data center infrastructure in India. For instance, within the span of one month, three major data centre operators set up facilities in India earlier this year. On May 5, NTT announced its new hyperscale data center facility in Mumbai. This was followed by US-based Trellix's new data center facility on May 19, and subsequently US-based Equinix's new data centre facility, announced on June 9. All three of these facilities have been announced to be set-up in Mumbai — interestingly one of the most expensive markets in Asia for real estate.

The new set of tools, announced earlier today by Honeywell, will seek to cater to such clients to help reduce data centre downtime. In an interview with Mint on August 28, Jonathon Dixon, managing director of Asia-Pacific, Japan and China for US-based content distribution network firm Cloudflare, said that data centre glitches-led downtimes can potentially cost companies billions of dollars, and are inevitable due to technical issues.

Dixon, however, added that adding maintenance and servicing tools, as well as adequate backups and redundancies, can help address the issue of data centre downtimes.