International. Honeywell and Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, announced they will work together to create integrated solutions to optimize the sustainability, resilience and operational performance of the data center. These solutions are expected to be available in 2020.
The partnership is based on Honeywell's building management systems (BMS), operating 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 hyperscale operators, large enterprise, co-location, and edge data centers to integrate multiple data domains within a data center. Companies will leverage building operations data to drive operations optimization, reducing energy use and costs while improving data center performance and sustainability.
"Data centers face similar challenges to other buildings that have disparate systems that weren't designed to work together, but experience these challenges on a larger scale," said Vimal Kapur, president and CEO of Honeywell Building Technologies. "We look forward to collaborating with Vertiv to deliver integrated solutions that make it easier for data center operators to distill the mountains of data they extract from their teams 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, leading to a simultaneous explosion of data and demand for new data centers. There is a need and opportunity for data centers to be more efficient, reliable and sustainable," said Rob Johnson, CEO of Vertiv. "Our collaboration with Honeywell will help us provide better collective service to our data center customers. Our offerings complement each other to provide greater value to data center operators."
Collaboration improves energy management for uptime, efficiency and sustainability
Data centers in 2018 consumed about 1% of global energy use. While the industry has made great strides in reducing and offsetting energy demands, including increasing the use of renewable energy, more work can be done to achieve a more sustainable and carbon-neutral future.
The companies' initial focus will be on micro-grid solutions for data centers to enable more efficient integration of alternative energy sources such as solar panels, fuel cells and batteries, and to provide a scalable approach for operators to quickly improve functionality and improve total cost of ownership.
The first offering of the collaboration will be an intelligent energy management solution that features a power resource management and monitoring control system on a single, integrated platform. Combining energy storage, analytics, forecasting, and economic optimization, the solution will provide data centers with intelligent, autonomous selection of power sources and network services to operate a data center load and reduce energy costs while maintaining uptime requirements. The solution can help data centers meet availability requirements while optimizing energy costs, meeting corporate sustainability goals, and reducing the overall carbon footprint. It will also enable operators to better manage sustainability objectives and take into account external risk factors such as climate and network reliability.
Resilient operations backed by trusted brands
The large amount of energy used for thermal management, building systems, and physical security within a data center can increase the risk of downtime. Honeywell and Vertiv's new intelligent power management solution is designed to enable remote monitoring and maintenance, reduce costs, eliminate redundancy, and improve energy use efficiency (PUE).
Combined, the companies sell industry-leading product brands that provide best-in-class differentiated support to data centers, including Honeywell's advanced sensing business featuring vesda's brand of advanced smoke detection technology; The Honeywell Forge enterprise performance management platform, including Honeywell Forge energy optimization; Enterprise Buildings Integrator (EBI) and the Niagara Framework; and Vertiv ™ Liebert® thermal and power management solutions, Vertiv ™ Avocent ™ IT management and monitoring solutions, and Vertiv ™ Geist ™ power distribution solutions.
