“This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.”
Learn how critical facilities teams operate and maintain live data centers, from planning a UPS maintenance window to responding to a cooling alarm in a high-density AI hall.
Data Center Operations & Maintenance: Critical Facilities is a professional course from Chartered Engineers Academy. Across 45 lessons in nine sections, you’ll work through the decisions that shape facility reliability, maintenance performance, incident response, and operating costs.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
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Critical facilities operations — Define shift responsibilities, structure handovers, interpret Tier topology from an operator’s perspective, and understand the drivers of operating expenditure.
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Operating procedures and safe work — Select the right SOP, MOP, or EOP. Review a Method of Procedure for approvals, validation, rollback, and permit-to-work requirements.
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Maintenance planning and reliability — Build a maintenance program using an asset register, equipment criticality, and task frequencies. Use CMMS work orders, backlog, reliability metrics, and critical spares data to prioritize work.
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Electrical systems O&M — Review normal, maintenance, and emergency configurations. Examine UPS and battery maintenance, generator testing, fuel management, and the records that support electrical safety.
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Mechanical and liquid cooling O&M — Examine chilled-water systems, heat rejection, air-side thermal management, and coolant distribution units. Cover fluid quality, water treatment, leak response, and seasonal setpoint changes.
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Monitoring and incident response — Use BMS, EPMS, and DCIM data to triage alarms, escalate incidents, and support root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews.
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Energy, capacity, and AI workloads — Interpret PUE and WUE, assess power and cooling headroom, and understand why short AI load spikes can challenge electrical limits even when average readings look acceptable.
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People, contractors, and lifecycle planning — Assess staffing, outsourced maintenance, customer SLAs, audits, asset renewal, and the operational risks of upgrading a live facility.
WHAT YOU’LL WORK THROUGH
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A UPS module replacement — Review how the team manages reduced redundancy, sets approval points, and reserves enough time to roll back within the maintenance window.
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A maintenance workload calculation — Use asset criticality, task frequencies, and labor estimates to assess staffing and contractor requirements.
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A high-density AI hall scenario — Compare how electrical equipment responds to short load spikes and how the cooling system responds to sustained thermal demand.
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The Larkspur Vale capstone — Review a year of operations at a fictional data center campus and use one operating scorecard to connect maintenance backlog, incidents, staffing, costs, energy performance, and capacity constraints.
WHO THIS COURSE IS FOR
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Data center operators, shift leads, and critical facilities technicians.
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Electrical, mechanical, and facilities engineers working in or moving into data center operations.
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Facilities managers, maintenance planners, reliability engineers, and O&M contractors.
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Commissioning and project delivery professionals preparing facilities for operational handover.
By the end of the course, you’ll be able to review a proposed maintenance activity, identify what it means for redundancy and capacity, and explain the actions the operations team should prioritize.
