Schneider Submits Data Center Operations Model to OCP

Schneider Electric has submitted a data center Facility Operations Maturity Model to Open Compute Project, the Facebook-led open source data center and hardware design community.

The framework is different from The Green Grid's maturity model in that it focuses specifically on facilities management, while TGG's model takes a holistic approach, encompassing both facilities and IT.

The submission is a step toward adding a facilities operations element to Open Compute's collection of specs and designs for servers, storage, and networking gear, as well as power and cooling infrastructure.

Today, data center operations are a fairly subjective thing, although there are industry best practices. Schneider’s submission attempts to provide a measuring stick for operational maturity. It is a framework to form best practices for people and processes across operations, including emergencies, as well as day-to-day stuff, such as maintenance, work-order management, etc.

"The Data Center Operations Maturity Model is an industry-first way of allowing organizations the ability to evaluate the operations of a data center with an open, non-proprietary framework," Jason Schafer, one of the model's creators and lead of the OCP Data Center Project, said.

Wide in scope, FOMM is divided into seven disciplines that are further divided into elements and sub-elements. The model rates a data center team's maturity on the scale of one to five, one being the the initial ad hoc stages, and five meaning optimized or refined processes and practices.

The assessment is done across several topics and sub-topics. It is extremely detailed. The people-management category, for example, even includes things like charting career development. That's in addition to guidelines on what people should do at the site, how they should monitor and measure efficiency, and how optimize the data center.

The model is currently under review. You can take a look at it on the Open Compute Wiki.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik contributed to this report.