- Joint effort combines Honeywell's technology expertise with Vertiv's critical digital infrastructure solutions to create more sustainable and efficient data center facilities
- The first joint offering combines intelligent selection of energy resources with centralized visibility of operational activities to help reduce energy consumption
Data centers help enable the online applications that people rely on for work, entertainment and communication, but they require significant power to move information around the world. Today, two industry leaders announced a collaboration to create more sustainable and efficient data center operations.
Honeywell (NYSE: HON), a global leader in connected buildings, and Vertiv (NYSE: VRT), a global provider of critical digital infrastructure solutions, will collaborate to create integrated solutions to optimize the sustainability, resilience and operational performance of data centers. The new solutions are expected to be available by 2020.
The partnership leverages Honeywell's industry-leading building management systems (BMS), operations software and safety and security products, along with Vertiv's uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), power distribution systems, thermal management solutions, infrastructure monitoring services and modular solutions, to enable hyperscale, enterprise, co-location and edge data center operators to integrate multiple data domains within one data center. The two companies will leverage development and manufacturing data from new equipment to optimize operations, reducing energy consumption and costs while improving data center performance and sustainability.
“Data centers face similar challenges as other buildings with disparate systems that were not designed to work together but experience these challenges on a larger scale,” said Vimal Kapur, president and CEO of Honeywell Building Technologies. “We are excited to partner with Vertiv to offer integrated solutions that make it easier for data center operators to filter the large amounts of data they extract from their infrastructures, generating more efficient and environmentally friendly processes.”
"Business continuity is more important than ever, with more people working, learning and connecting remotely, driving a simultaneous explosion of data and demand for new data centers. Data centers must be more efficient, reliable and sustainable," said Rob Johnson, CEO of Vertiv. "Our collaboration with Honeywell will help us better serve our customers. Our offerings will complement each other and provide greater value to data center operators."
Collaboration improves power management to ensure uptime, efficiency and sustainability
In 2018, data centers used approximately 1% of the world's energy consumption.[i],[ii] While the industry has made great strides to reduce and offset energy demand, including increasing the use of renewable energy, much can still be done to achieve a more sustainable and zero-emission future in this sector too.
The companies' initial focus will be on microgrid solutions for data centers, 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 rapidly improve functionality and optimize costs.
The first offering that will arise from this collaboration will be an intelligent energy management solution that will also include a control system in a single integrated platform. By combining energy storage, analytics, forecasting and economic optimization, the solution will provide data centers with intelligent, autonomous selection of energy sources and network services to manage data center load and reduce costs while maintaining uptime requirements. The solution can help data centers meet availability requirements by optimizing energy costs, achieving corporate sustainability goals and reducing overall carbon emissions. It will also allow operators to take into account external risk factors, such as weather conditions and network reliability.
Resilience operations supported by trusted brands
The large amount of energy used for thermal management services, building systems and physical security within a data center could increase the risk of downtime. The new scalable and easy-to-deploy intelligent power management solution from Honeywell and Vertiv is designed to enable remote monitoring and maintenance, reduce costs, eliminate redundancy and improve power usage efficiency (PUE).
Together, the two companies market industry-leading product brands that provide best-in-class differentiated data center support such as, to name a few: detection activity provided by Honeywell VESDA, featuring advanced smoke detection technology; the Honeywell Forge business performance management platform, including Honeywell Forge Energy Optimization; Enterprise Buildings Integrator (EBI) and Niagara Framework; Vertiv solutions™ Liebert® for power supply and electrical continuity and thermal management systems, Vertiv™ Avocent™ for the monitoring and management of IT and Vertiv equipment™ Geist™ for power distribution systems.
To learn more about data center collaborations between Honeywell and Vertiv, see https://hwll.co/vqtw6 O http://b.link/3c94d.
