Critical Operations Professional is an advanced level course in DCPro’s career progression framework and covers the successful operation of a data center by the facilities, moves and changes, and cabling teams.  It covers the re-evaluation of business criticality assessment and Tier levels through to critical operational procedures.

Students are encouraged to discuss their real-world experience within the classroom and will have the benefit of many hand-outs as examples of procedures and processes.  Exercises provide opportunities to reinforce the learned material for application back in their own data center environment.

Course Outline and Main Topics Covered

Students will be able to:

1. Undertake a business needs assessment for a data center, identify availability requirements and an appropriate tier classification and understand some techniques of demand forecasting
2. Discuss data center finance terms, budgets and financial analysis and reporting requirements
3. Recognise the human factors relating to downtime incidents and the impact of downtime on their business
4. Correctly manage risk, identifying the benefits, methodologies and techniques of comprehensive risk management
5. Identify the impact of electrical and mechanical operations on the critical operations of a data center and safe working practices
6. Differentiate between data center cooling systems, efficient operating parameters, new efficiency metrics and their operational impacts
7. Identify the operational impacts of moves, adds, changes and the logistics support of these activities
8. Understand the operational impact of a rapidly increasing amount of building and systems data reporting and the dangers of incorrect alarm prioritisation and processing
9. Identify the minimum operational requirements of ancillary services such as fire and security systems and the building fabric maintenance, cleaning and estate management and third party maintenance contracts
10. Recognise the basic data center statutory inspections, registers and maintenance records and documentation required