The News: Honeywell’s Data Center Suite has been unveiled, bringing data center (DC) managers critical new tools to improve and streamline their facilities. Included in this software suite are applications built to monitor and optimize data center uptime, worker productivity, asset health, operational expenses and more. Read the full Honeywell Press Release.

Honeywell Data Center Software Suite Bolsters DC Operations

Analyst Take: The new Honeywell Data Center Suite is a smart move from the Honeywell Building Technologies unit to provide a well-stocked collection of targeted software tools that can be used by busy and stressed data center managers and workers to improve and better monitor their business-critical facilities.

Data center operations have incredibly complex missions – they must strive for 100 percent uptime and always be available to deliver on the demanding needs of business customers, while also providing complex redundancies to maintain that uptime if that first mission should falter even for a moment. There is immense pressure, and a data center company’s reputation is always on the line.

To help counter some of these pressures, the new Honeywell Data Center Suite is filled with broad applications that can handle a myriad of critical tasks in data center management and observability, making operations more fluid for managers and employees.

Those are exactly the kinds of software management tools that we have come to expect from Honeywell over the years, as the company continues to find new ways to better serve its customers and find new avenues to bring its expertise to enterprises and businesses.

The new Honeywell Data Center Suite includes a Data Center Manager application which provides a vendor-agnostic dashboard where operators can watch and manage everything from critical power and thermal assets to IT data across the data center. Also included is a Portfolio View app which lets data center managers monitor their global network operations and enable data-driven decisions to reach uptime and sustainability goals. A Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance module is a Software-as-a-Service product that lets data center managers track operations and detect early signs of problems before they lead to downtime. All the applications and services are also designed to provide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which give improved visibility into data center sustainability strategies as well.

A Deeper Dive Into The New Honeywell Data Center Suite

The technology behind the Honeywell Data Center Suite is based on open architecture Niagara Framework and combines data from a data center’s operational technology (OT) and IT infrastructures.

Using this framework, the Data Center Manager helps data center managers by replacing old workflows where OT and IT data had to be collected manually in the past. Instead, DC operators can now get proactive monitoring and management of critical infrastructure by aggregating that OT and IT data into a single source, which dramatically improves operations. The application also helps to diagnose system alarms and identify the root causes of problems, create plans to fix the issues and reduce the potential for human errors, according to Honeywell. Also valuable is that the application proactively generates situation-specific recommendations to maintain uptime and service-level agreement (SLA) compliance, while also providing insights into energy and carbon use.

The Portfolio View application works with Honeywell Data Center Manager to securely monitor a company’s data centers around the world, whether in one location at a time or globally at once. KPI-based scores are generated for each site for metrics including uptime, power usage effectiveness (PUE), carbon usage effectiveness (CUE), and water usage effectiveness (WUE). KPI scores can also be provided for space and capacity utilization, energy consumption, and other factors. Logs and reports can also be generated to provide deep details on fleetwide performance and trends, as well as individual site anomalies, so the insights can be shared with a company’s executives.

Also adding value to the new Honeywell Data Center Suite is the Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance application, which provides critical help to data centers in ensuring uninterrupted power and reliable cooling systems for stable operations. The application uses a condition-based maintenance strategy that detects critical asset problems early by tracking intrinsic signs to prevent downtime, increasing asset service life and reducing maintenance and energy costs. In addition, advanced fault-detection analytics provide real-time, actionable intelligence on asset performance, pre-failure alerts and benchmarks for zone temperature control, asset availability, energy consumption and service case performance, which are all critical points for data center managers.

The cloud-based Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance application can be coupled with other Honeywell remote building management applications and services to drive improved SLA performance.

These are all great capabilities for data center operators, giving them much deeper and more valuable real-time insights into a wide range of critical operational factors than they may have had before – any of which can stop a data center’s uptime in a split second.

The importance of these services cannot be underestimated by data center operators, and that was firmly in the minds of engineers at Honeywell when these products were green-lighted and created.

Our Overview on Honeywell Data Center Suite

Without reliable data centers, the world of business – from retailing to manufacturing to tech and everything in-between – would come to a crashing halt.

To prevent such catastrophes, the new Honeywell Data Center Suite is well-positioned to bring needed and trusted help to data center operators that have likely already worked with Honeywell in the past. That familiarity and trust is a huge plus here with these services, which take mission-critical services to a whole new level of protection for data center operators.

Honeywell is a technology powerhouse in an era of digital transformation—especially at the edge and in heavy industries like aerospace, manufacturing, construction, and the public sector.

And adding value, Honeywell is continuing to evolve beyond its diverse industrial resume through a multi-year pivot to transition to more software-focused products, while tapping into its rich industry data. This new Honeywell Data Center Suite is more evidence that this plan is working successfully and driving new business and innovations in the marketplace.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.