Fuel for thought

“AND WHATEVER PRICE YOU GET at the moment, we can cut another 15% off it”, said the voice on the other end of the phone. I have to admit that he sounded very earnest; there was no trace of doubt in his pitch.

He was offering me the best deal since the government forgot to add a couple of zeros to the price of Royal Mail.
We’ve all had (numerous) calls like this so we all know there’s a fundamental difference between salespeople and the rest of us.

They think that taking their call is the most important thing we’ll do today; we think dodging the call deserves that honour.
UK businesses seem to have moved to two polar extremes in the last couple of years. You’re either experiencing frantic business or you’re going out of business. Nobody seems to be cruising along comfortably.

Being disturbed by sales calls is turning from a distraction to a disaster. What we need are ways to simplify our lives, not make them more complex and distract us from our real job.
So what has this got to do with data centre management?
If you’re reading Data Centre Solutions your job revolves around keeping servers running and customers happy. Your KPIs revolve around uptime and efficiency. You don’t want to worry about who’s supplying the tea, whether there are enough spaces in the car park or – to use my company’s field of business – if your stored fuel is fit for purpose.
These are all distractions but your fuel is a different class of distraction. It has the capacity to bring your data centre to a halt, trashing your performance figures and your customer relationships. We’re starting to see reports of cascading DRUPS failures where one unit after another fails, disrupting the smooth power supply and triggering server resets.

Despite this, fuel can never be anywhere near the top of your priority list. Although there’s a risk that dirty fuel can provoke a disaster, it’s unlikely. You want to know that there’s somebody out there ‘taking care of it’.
That’s where the fuel maintenance industry has been spectacularly unhelpful. We’ve given you Company A that will test your fuel to see if there’s a problem. When you find out that there is, can Company A help? No, they’re just a testing company. You need to find Company B to clean the filthy fuel.

And is this the end of the story? Of course not! Your clean fuel only stays clean if it’s polished. You need Company C for that. And Company D for the stabiliser additives that neutralise any remaining water.

Is it any wonder that fuel maintenance is so difficult to sell? Data centre managers want a ‘sort the problem and send me the bill’ service but what we offer is a fragmented and hostile marketplace.

Nobody wins in this situation. Fuel maintenance companies lose sales, that’s obvious, but we’re not the only losers.
Fuel contamination is a genuine problem. Aged diesel is badly polluted by colloid carbon and rust. Biodiesel is afflicted by water and the diesel bug. The test results we have seen are horrific. Modern backup generators will fail when fed such diesel and that’s a problem for your data centre. It will happen - and we all lose when it does.

It will come as no surprise to hear that there is an answer. It’s called a Fuel Maintenance Programme: everything you need wrapped up in a single programme from a single supplier. Some fuel maintenance companies are already there, most are not. I’m not going to tell you which ones are already there because this article is meant to be neutral – I’ll leave you to do the digging.

The beauty of a Fuel Maintenance Programme is its simplicity. One company handles everything to do with maintaining your fuel quality: testing, cleaning, polishing and stabilising. It is the ‘sort it and bill me’ solution that fits a low-priority but genuine threat. It also solves that perennial problem of modern business: accountability. When there is a system problem IT Managers are already used to seeing the buck passed faster than a counterfeit tenner. It’s an application fault, then an operating system bug, then a hardware problem, then a data issue.

The same merry-go-round affects anyone who buys fuel maintenance services from different suppliers. The polisher’s filters only blocked because the cleaning service was inadequate. The cleaning service would have been perfect if the test had correctly identified the type of contamination. The stabiliser additive would have worked if the polisher had removed the main bulk of the water.

We all know where that leaves the data centre manager: in trouble!
A Fuel Maintenance Programme is simple to administer and gives you the reassurance that your fuel is one thing you do not need to worry about. It is a flexible entity too.With security being a major concern you may not want fuel testers walking in and out of your centre every month especially if holidays and staff rotations mean you don’t see the same tester each time. A flexible programme includes training so your own staff can perform simple tasks such as fuel testing, leaving your supplier to provide the consumables on a regular basis.

Your Fuel Maintenance Programme will be tailored to suit your data centre. More modern data centres with new tanks and air vent traps will suffer less contamination; quarterly testing could be more appropriate than monthly. Buildings using both day and bulk storage tanks may prefer to focus attention on the smaller day tanks and leave the problems of the bulk storage tanks to another budget cycle. Data centres with sensitive customers reap an extra benefit: discretion. One of our more colourful managers says that parking a fuel cleaning rig outside a datacentre is like parking a Rentokil van outside McDonald’s. Fuel testing and cleaning is the right action for any responsible data centre manager to
take. But if a customer arrives during cleaning, will they take away the wrong impression?

With a single Fuel Maintenance Partner there’s only one company to instruct about the importance of plain overalls and unmarked vans. To an outsider, fuel maintenance staff will look like just another type of maintenance staff. No alarm bells will sound. The key is that a Fuel Maintenance Programme puts you in control. You deal with one supplier. You receive advice from one source. You give instructions to one contact. To summarise, a Fuel Maintenance Programme is an appropriate response to the low-level but genuine threat of fuel contamination.

It provides your data centre with the protection it needs in a way that occupies as little of your time and attention as possible. It simplifies purchasing and management, providing best-in-class systems from a single, accountable source.