Data Centre Blog

The EU taxonomy is a classification system, establishing a list of environmentally sustainable economic activities. Article 8(1) of Regulation (EU) 2020/852 requires undertakings to disclose how and to what extent their activities are associated with environmentally sustainable economic activities. This has led to an Assessment Framework for data centres in the context of activity 8.1 […]

Should a data centre BMS or DCIM be powered by the same system it is monitoring? Most data centre BMS systems are powered by one of the UPS sets used for the ICT equipment so they are effectively powered by what they are monitoring. TIA-942 Revision B, 2017 Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers, states […]

Do we need more bandwidth for a copper cable system? No: we have Cat6A, Category 7 and Category 8 already. Category 6 gives us 250 MHz bandwidth over 100 metres and Category 6A gives us 500 MHz over 100 metres which maps out to 5 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s data capacity respectively (IEEE 802.3an and […]

Capitoline has launched a new online version of its popular data centre technician training course, DCT. Technicians play a vital role in the day-to-day operations of a data centre and require  skill sets that cover aspects of electrical, mechanical and information technology applications plus the management techniques that keep track of all critical incidents and […]

The Telecommunication Industry Association (Arlington, VA) has appointed Capitoline Ltd (London, UK) as a TIA-942 licensed certification body and training provider. The TIA-942 Certification Program enables data centers to be reviewed and certified for conformity to the requirements of the globally-recognized ANSI/TIA-942 standard, providing greater assurance to customers and stakeholders. The program includes a worldwide […]

Capitoline is pleased to announce the introduction of the world’s first independent data centrecleaning certification for companies. Three years after launching our ground-breaking Data Center Cleaning Specialist, DCCS, qualificationfor individuals, we have listened to our customers and extended the program to include thespecialist cleaning companies as well. Membership of the program requires companies to have […]

Share your certification with your friends and colleagues and your prospective employers by posting it to your social network on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and adding it to your LinkedIn profile. Once you have passed a certified course you will be awarded a logo for that course. You can view these in ‘My Logos’. On […]

Last week I conducted an audit of the headquarters building of a large county council. The purpose was to identify the location of a new computer room which would also house the building control systems. I might as well have done the audit on a Christmas morning as the place was so deserted. A few […]

Date, time: June 17th 2020, Wednesday, 9am London time / 12 pm Dubai time / 11 am Riyadh, Doha time A 45-minute webinar by Capitoline, hosted by our Dubai partners e-sharp, on the basics of self-certifying a data centre to the requirements of international standards TIA942, BICSI-002, EN50600 and ISO 22237. What are the international […]

As a company we have written and spoken many times about the need for ventilation in the computer room and general data centre environment. We have talked about the need to reduce dust building up on equipment which causes it to overheat. We have spoken about the need to reduce Volatile Organic Components, VOCs, building […]

In our years of data centre auditing one of our standard questions is, ‘how much fuel do you have for the standby generators?’ The answer usually comes back as so many hours but then always ends with, ‘but we have a resupply contract with a local supplier.’ This always raises the question in my mind […]

Capitoline is pleased to announce that we are extending our helping hand to all those data center professionals now working from home. As Governments continue to extend the lockdown, Capitoline is continuing to offer a massive 50% discount off the entire range of data center on-line training packages. In an unrivalled package of industry-approved on-line […]

The MCP Directive, or Directive (EU) 2015/2193 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2015 on the limitation of emissions of certain pollutants into the air from medium combustion plants, came into force on 18th December 2015 and was transposed into national law by December 2017. New controls will then apply [...]

Restriction on the use of Flourinated gasses including HFCs are coming into force. What does this mean to Data Centre Operators? Find out more…

The purpose of an audit is for an independent third party to examine the data centre and assess it against best practice to identify where it is compliant and where improvements can be made. However, the purpose of the audit is not always the same. Here we will identify some of the more common reasons for carrying out a data centre audit.

EN 50600-3-1 is part of the European EN 50600 series of data centre standards and has now also been published as an ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Technical Specification, the first stage to it becoming an International Standard. We explore what it contains and why it is unique…

There is plenty of evidence that dirt, dust and debris poses a real risk in data centers. We will look at some examples we have found through our work as data center consultants.

For many years we have been relying on Telecommunications Cabling Standards and proprietary documents to guide us in data centre design. No longer. An ISO data centre standard is coming…

How do we decide which data centre standard to build a new data centre to and who can certify that it meets the requirements of the standard? Read more to find out…

In the year since the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect, what impact has it had on those who operate, manage and use data centres?

Data centre fires and false alarms account for the longest periods of facilities-related data centre outages – in excess of twenty-four hours on average. Targeted fire-safety management training for data centre professionals will reduce this. Read more…

We have seen a decade of consolidation of the data centre industry with larger and larger data centres being built in clusters around London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris and now more and more, Dublin. This centralised approach is dominated by big colocation companies such as Equinix and Interxion and by Cloud providers such as Amazon, IBM and Microsoft. The downsides of centralisation, as in any business, are reliability, costs (if your customers are very distributed) and network latency, i.e. the delay caused by long communications links between computers and networking equipment.If you have a lot of users storing and processing data in an area remote from the traditional centres of cloud providers then it makes sense to build a smaller datacentre nearer to the customers, hence the rise (or resurgence) of the Edge data centre.

Every few months we see a headline, like this one, in the technical press, and the article is usually written by a training company keen to point out said shortage. So when I saw a similar headline recently, but headlined by Google, Microsoft and Uber it caught my eye. The spokesman for Microsoft mentioned the […]

We are delighted to announce the simultaneous launch of our new Online Data Centre Training, ‘Training by Capitoline’, and our new Data Centre Blog on this website. With the launch of this new site our training is now available online for you to learn at your own pace where and when you want to.