Plan maintenance on CRAC, CRAH and chilled water plant without breaching redundancy or thermal margins.
Engineering & Maintenance
Maintenance Engineering for Data Centre Cooling and Power Infrastructure
Prepares facilities engineers to maintain data centre CRAC/CRAH units, chilled water plant, UPS, generators and switchgear to the availability levels critical loads demand.
🗓️Duration5 training days
📚Content4 modules · 8 sessions
🎓On completionAccredited attendance certificate
About the programme
Course Overview
A data centre does not tolerate the maintenance rhythms of a typical facility: a cooling unit failure has minutes, not hours, before racks throttle, and a mistimed generator test can itself trigger the outage it was meant to prevent. This course covers the mechanical and electrical infrastructure that keeps a data hall within its thermal and power envelope, including CRAC and CRAH units, chilled water and free-cooling plant, in-row and rear-door cooling, UPS systems, generators and low-voltage switchgear. Participants learn maintenance sequencing that respects N+1 and 2N redundancy, the concurrent-maintainability principles behind Uptime Institute tier definitions, and the load-bank testing, battery health checks and fuel management practices that keep standby power ready without risking a live failover. Sessions cover thermal mapping, hot-aisle containment airflow verification and capacity planning as IT loads and rack densities rise. The course closes with change management and maintenance window planning for a live, always-on environment, leaving participants able to keep cooling and power infrastructure serviceable without threatening availability targets.
Expected Learning Outcomes
Sequence UPS, generator and switchgear maintenance around N+1 and 2N redundancy configurations.
Conduct load-bank testing, battery health checks and fuel management for standby power readiness.
Verify hot-aisle and cold-aisle containment airflow performance against rising rack power densities.
Apply concurrent-maintainability principles aligned with Uptime Institute tier requirements.
Coordinate maintenance windows and change management processes for continuously operating facilities.
Plan capacity and infrastructure upgrades that keep pace with increasing IT load density.
Who Should Attend
Data centre facilities engineers responsible for cooling and power systems.
Critical facilities managers overseeing uptime and redundancy compliance.
Electrical engineers maintaining UPS, generator and switchgear assets.
Mechanical engineers maintaining chilled water and precision cooling plant.
Reliability engineers building maintenance strategies for always-on environments.
Site operations managers planning maintenance windows for colocation facilities.
Course Modules
Select any module to see its sessions and points.
01Data Centre Cooling Systems and Thermal Management
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Precision Cooling and Airflow Management
- Compare CRAC, CRAH, in-row and rear-door cooling architectures and their maintenance access requirements.
- Verify hot-aisle and cold-aisle containment integrity to prevent bypass airflow and recirculation.
- Interpret thermal mapping and sensor data to detect hotspots before they affect rack equipment.
- Assess humidity and dew point control settings to avoid condensation and electrostatic discharge risk.
Session 2Chilled Water Plant and Free Cooling Systems
- Maintain chillers, pumps and cooling towers supporting data hall chilled water loops.
- Evaluate free cooling and economiser mode operation and its impact on maintenance scheduling.
- Inspect glycol systems, heat exchangers and valve actuation for reliable mode switching.
- Plan chilled water plant maintenance around redundant loop configurations to avoid single points of failure.
02Power Infrastructure Reliability
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1UPS and Battery System Maintenance
- Conduct UPS module inspection, firmware verification and bypass testing without interrupting critical load.
- Perform battery health checks including internal resistance testing and thermal imaging of terminals.
- Plan battery replacement cycles based on manufacturer life data and site temperature conditions.
- Verify UPS transfer and synchronisation behaviour during scheduled maintenance switching.
Session 2Generator and Switchgear Maintenance
- Plan load-bank testing and fuel quality management to keep standby generators reliably available.
- Inspect automatic transfer switches and switchgear interlocks for correct failover sequencing.
- Coordinate generator exercise schedules to minimise wear while meeting readiness testing requirements.
- Review protection relay settings and coordination studies during switchgear maintenance outages.
03Redundancy, Tier Standards and Maintenance Sequencing
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Concurrent Maintainability and Tier Requirements
- Apply concurrent-maintainability principles so that maintenance on one path never removes required redundancy.
- Interpret Uptime Institute tier concepts to define permissible maintenance sequences for each infrastructure path.
- Assess single points of failure introduced by maintenance activities before authorising work.
- Coordinate maintenance across mechanical and electrical systems that share common redundancy boundaries.
Session 2Maintenance Sequencing and Risk Assessment
- Build a maintenance sequence plan that isolates one redundant path at a time across cooling and power systems.
- Conduct pre-maintenance risk assessments identifying dependencies between cooling and power infrastructure.
- Define rollback and abort criteria for maintenance activities that risk exceeding thermal or power margins.
- Brief operations teams and monitoring staff before high-risk maintenance windows begin.
04Change Management and Capacity Planning
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Change Management for Live Facilities
- Apply change management processes that document risk, rollback plans and approval for infrastructure work.
- Coordinate maintenance windows with IT operations to align with lower-risk load periods.
- Record post-maintenance verification checks confirming systems returned to full redundancy.
- Investigate near-miss events during maintenance to strengthen procedures and checklists.
Session 2Capacity Planning for Rising Rack Density
- Assess cooling and power capacity headroom against increasing rack power density from high-performance computing.
- Plan phased infrastructure upgrades that maintain redundancy while capacity is added.
- Evaluate liquid cooling retrofit options and their integration with existing air-cooled infrastructure.
- Present capacity and maintenance risk assessments to facilities and IT stakeholders for investment decisions.
What the participant receives
4 course modules
A structured syllabus
8 training sessions
across 5 days
32 detailed points
Applied, detailed content
Accredited attendance certificate
On completing the programme
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