Data Centre - Standards v standards Update!
John Booth MBCS, CDCAP, CDCSP
Digital Infrastructure Energy Efficiency/Sustainability Consultant, ISO 22301/50001 Lead Auditor, ESOS Lead Assessor, Public Speaker, Former Lecturer - BCU, SDIA AB, EU-JRC Consultant EUCOC, DCS Award Winner
With the publication of the EN50600 series as ISO TS's on the 26th April 2018 and referenced as follows:
ISO/IEC 22237-1 - EN50600-1 Information technology- Data centre facilities and infrastructures Part 1:General concepts
ISO/IEC 22237-2 - EN50600 2-1 Information technology- Data centre facilities and infrastructures Part 2: Building construction
ISO22237-3 - EN50600 2-2 Information technology - Data centre facilities and infrastructures Part 3: Power distribution
ISO22237-4 - EN50600 2-3 Information technology - Data centre facilities and infrastructure Part 4: Environmental control
ISO22237-5 - EN50600 2-4 Information technology - Data centre facilities and infrastructure Part 5: Telecommunications cabling infrastructure
ISO22237-6 - EN50600 2-5 Information technology - Data centre facilities and infrastructure Part 6: Security systems
ISO22237-7 - EN50600 3-1 Information technology - Data centre facilities and infrastucture Part 7: Management and operational information
I felt that it was time to revise this post, since the original publication, there have been at least 3 changes and probably many more to come, as this industry or sector (whatever your preference) is prone to rapid change and new ways of designing, building and operating data centre, either hyperscale, colocation, enterprise or edge are appearing all ther time.
It is very interesting how many data centre people get confused over Standards and standards. To clarify, a Standard is exactly that, a Standard, a Standard is either a nationally recognised document issued by the national standards body, in the UK this is the British Standards Institute (BSI) and it will be prefixed by British Standard (BS) or a regionally recognised document issued by a regional authority, in the EU, this will either be CEN, CENELEC, or ETSI and prefixed by European Normale (EN) or an International Standard issued by the International Standards Organisation and prefixed ISO. Standards may be upgraded from BS or EN to ISO, a good example would be the BS5750 Quality Management Standard which is now ISO9001.
You can be "certified" to a standard, this means that your processes and procedures that relate to a particular site (and this is referenced in your certificate) can be externally assessed by an approved company to "certify" that they meet the required Standard. Or you can undertake "compliance or conformance" to a Standard. What is the difference, well if you undertake certification to a Standard, the company assessing you must be (in the UK at least) registered with the United Kingdom Accreditation Service or an associate of one that is, by associate we mean a company who fully complies with the requirements of the body accredited by UKAS.
Accredited bodies can be found on this link https://www.ukas.com/about-accreditation/accredited-bodies/.
Conformance to a Standard is usually undertaken by a body who is not accredited, although they might give the impression that they are, so be aware and ask for confirmation of their accreditation with UKAS.
Does it matter who you are accredited with, UKAS or whoever? well, yes it does, some procurement processes require that you are certified by an UKAS accredited body, we were recently advised that a building company lost out on ￡120 million pounds worth of work because although they thought they were "certified", it transpired that the company who did the "certification" were not UKAS accredited. This resulted in ￡40,000 worth of re-certification of their systems, processes and procedures and probably a severe censure of the "quality" manager.
So, be aware that its probably best to be "certified" by a UKAS accredited organisation.
Standards you might want to think about if you're in the Data Centre Wholesale arena (i.e you sell space/power/cooling to enterprises) are as follows:
ISO9001 Quality Management Systems, ISO14001 Environmental Management Systems, ISO22301 Business Continuity Management Systems, ISO27001 Information Security Management Systems, and finally ISO50001 Energy Management Systems.
EN50600 is the equivalent of BICSI -002, which are both Data Centre design standards, for power, cooling and cabling systems but my sources tell me that "certification" to BICSI-002 is not possible yet, although it may be in the future.
EN50600 has now been issued as a series of ISO Technical Specifications, the ISO22237 series and detailed above and will be subject to a 5year revision cycle as with all ISO Standards.
There are also 2 documents in final draft, these are EN50600 -99-2 "Recommended practices for environmental sustainability" and EN50600 99-3 "Guidance to the application of EN50600 series" These will be published in due course and after ratification by the national bodies
So, those are the Standards, what are the standards?
The standards are those that you think are Standards but actually aren't, these include TIA942, which although is an American National Standards Institute document, is not certifiable, it is however able to be assessed with a view to be considered as "conforming" or "complying" to the Standard, but you cannot be "certified" to it.
Similarly, many data centre people think that you can be certified to a Tier level, well, no you cant, the Uptime Institute is not a certifying body, the Tier Topology is not a Standard, although it can be considered to be a standard. The Uptime Institute is a private company and can place a note that the site conforms with their requirements, but it is not a certification to a Standard.
EPI has just issued what it states is a Standard, but is in fact another standard, they even go as far to say that they are following official processes, that maybe, but until EPI become a member of their national standards bodies and officially particpate it is sadly just another private company seeking to earn money from the ignorance of the data centre buying public.
The EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres (Energy Efficiency) (EUCOC) is now part of a Standard as it now forms part of EN50600 as a technical report, and it is also a standard and one that you can participate in by applying directly to the EU - JRC who administer the scheme, further information can be found here https://iet.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/ict-codes-conduct/data-centres-energy-efficiency
However, in the UK, it is a requirement for all Government Data Centres and this includes their own sites, colocation sites, hosting sites and GCloud sites to be participants to the EUCOC, if you want to sell services to the public sector you must be a participant to the EUCOC.
Finally, there are a few "certifications" to various bits or even all of data centre operations, these include the "Certified Data Centre Energy Efficiency Award" or CEEDA. How is this possible? Well, CEEDA is administered by Datacenter Dynamics on behalf of the British Computer Society (BCS), the BCS has its own royal charter that allows it to "certify" training courses, award schemes etc and that is how CEEDA is a certification. More information on CEEDA can be found https://www.ceedacert.com/
The Data Centre Alliance has its own certification scheme, more info https://www.data-central.org/?page=Certifications
We are currently reviewing this scheme and information on this certification will be released by the DCA shortly.
Whilst, this is not a single certifiable accreditation as such, it does require that an organisation is "certified" to Standards, although we understand that there is likely to be some revisions to their requirements.
In essence, customers are demanding that data centres are increasingly certified to a set of Standards rather than standards, we've highlighted those we think are essential but at the end of the day it is your business and you should get what you think you need.
Carbon3IT Ltd is the only independent energy efficiency consulting organisation in the UK that specialises in Data Centres.
We are ISO50001 Lead Auditors, we are EMA registered ESOS lead assessors, we provide review services for the EUCOC to the European Union - Joint Research Centre, as well as sitting on the EUCOC best practices committee.
We are the Global Lead Assessors/Auditors to the BCS CEEDA award.
Our MD sits on the BSI's TCT7/3 which recently absorbed the IST 46 Sustainability, for and by ICT, mirror group to ISO JTC/1 SC39 committee that is developing data centre metrics Standards such as PUE and ERE. This committee developed the EN50600 series, of which, the first 4 in the series are presently under review.
General Manager at Rahi (a division of Wesco)
8 年I have been involved in standards development in Australia for many years and have had the opportunity over the years to sit in on both TIA and ISO standards committee meetings and be able to understand the drivers and politics within each. Unfortunately, both are driven by particular vendor interests but that is how it has to be because someone has to pay for all the work being done. Having said that, it is also obvious to me that TIA standards only reflect the opinions of the North American market and although they are used in some countries around the world, the majority of countries have come to realise that ISO standards are the right ones to specify outside the USA and that is how it should be. Within ISO, the USA only has one vote and therefore some vendors cannot control the outcome in the same way they do within the TIA standards work. Just look at the way the TIA standards committees did such a good job in keeping shielded cabling at bay for as long as they did. This was driven by particular North American company interests and not the best interests of the customer in my opinion. Specific to cabling, it is also worthy to note that the IEEE standards now refer to ISO standards for compliance and that should tell you which standard is the correct one to refer to.
Government Relations | Public Policy | Technical Standards | Advocacy
8 年Perhaps we should strive to focus more on aligning design and operations to our business needs instead of standards. I am sure there is a place for the various standards, but surely each site should be treated differently
Retired
8 年John, EPI (in Singapore but also eleswhere) is certified by TIA to use their logo etc and certify compliance with 942-A. That was what caused the schism between TIA and Uptime
Business Development The Rosebery Group Ltd
8 年Hi John, great article, thank you. Gary Digva, the above piece by John will be very useful to you going forward and will cover some of the aspects we spoke about last week. I hope this will help.