TIA-942 Data Center Audits
It was one of the engagements for public sector banks. They wanted to conduct a data center audit. It was a child’s play for me. I was told about this by my manager. But as a regular habit, I asked for the engagement letter with client before proceeding further.
Always ask for engagement letter/scope document before starting the project.
Engagement Document read “TIA-942”, Tire 3. I am like what the hell on earth is TIA 942?. Immediately I ducked it to understand it was a data center standard and an excellent way to ensure everything is in place.
How is it different from normal ISO standard? This standard covers wide areas of a DC. Typically:
- Architectural and Structural
- Electrical
- Mechanical Systems
- Tele-Communication.
- Redundancy.
Now, my background is Electronics and communication + Cyber Security. When I saw the checklist/TIA document (https://www.tic.ir/Content/media/article/TIA%20942%20-A(2012)_0.PDF), I was not able to understand other areas. Refer Page 71 in the above Link. We had to perform audit on Tire 3 of TIA 942 standard. I had only two days to prepare a checklist and go for the audit. So I took a shortcut.
Connect with the subject matter expertise on call instead of wasting time on blogs/articles and youtube.
Mechanical, Electrical and Architectural sections were totally unknown to me. So I called one of my friend was was an ‘actual’ mechanical engineer and discussed the checklist line by line.
Next was a call to electrical and civil engineers to discuss the portion of checklist. Some of the technical terms I would like to put it here to set the context:
Architectural:
- Wind Uplift Resistance
- Fire Ratings
- Bearing Walls
- Loading Docks
- Bracing
- Slab thickness
- Load bearing capacity etc !
Electrical:
- Power suppression
- Cabling
- Batter monitoring system
- Grounding
- Site circuit breaker
Mechanical
- Pressure monitoring
- Cooling system
- HVAC
- Plumbing
- Water leakage, Smoke detection, GAS supression etc…
It was a heavy project for me. I remember my first year engineering semester where I had learnt all these terminologies in brief. Now I understand why they design a generic syllabus in engineering first year.
Some quick tips:
- DCs gets audited very frequently. Every month they have 2 to 3 audits. They already know their short comings and your checklist. They sometimes would know more than you. Don’t lose confidence in any circumstances. Keep you eyes open full day.
- Be sure you visit all floors. Right from the underground to terrace.
- Roam around through all the racks and aisle. Don’t miss a single row on a single floor. Start with top most floor.
- Read about recent DC burnouts or incidents and root causes of it to do the audit in depth.
- If DC is TIA certified already, ask for certificate and in which section they are certified. Some gets certified only in one domain . Ex: Mechanical. Keep an eye on it.
- Ask for the footages/records of ‘Sundays’ or ‘Public Holidays’ and especially at 3 am to 6 am to know the full picture on security.
- DC construction company generally puts details of DC on their website. Check it out.
Reporting:
Take a printout of the checklist. Since its a DC, they won’t allow you to take your laptop inside. Check for evidence and use your logical mind.
Ex: How do you check for the floor thickness where you are standing? This is to ensure that the floors are heavy enough to take the load.
Ans: Go to stairs region. You will be able to see the thickness of the floor/slab.
How to check for fire-rating?
Simply ask for certificate of doors and window. If they are Wooden, then no need of any certificate ! Direct N.C !
Corporate Bytes.
Lets say you have 4 DC in scope. If you are allocated 4 days to complete, deploy 2 resources for 2 days. Two mindset will be more fruitful.
Also take with you a person who has not visited any DC ever. He/she will remember you always for the experience and work their ass off to perform the work.
Make others grow for your growth.
