Server Room Air Conditioning
These days businesses vital assets are often their IT hardware systems. Servers and technical support equipment are the repositories for all of an organisations data and processing tools. Not only does computer hardware and communications systems need dedicated, secure locations but they also need to be maintained at an optimum temperature for maximum performance twenty-four hours a day. Server room air conditioning is something no business can be without.
All kinds of machinery especially computer hardware generate a lot of heat during the normal course of operation. Unless the air temperature is maintained at a constant level, in summer conditions, it is not unusual for equipment to overheat and shut down. This is not a desirable state of affairs when your sales team are met with blank monitor screens or your bank transfers fail. Even laptop computers can overheat especially when under pressure from gaming or watching videos and it is not unusual to find the computer switches itself off and you will find the exterior casing almost burns to the touch. Imagine this happening with all of your business machinery.
Server rooms these days are the hub of all IT and tech support equipment and to protect your business and expensive hardware, proper server room air conditioning needs to be provided not only for longevity and protection of your assets but for safety as well as overheated equipment have been known to cause fires.
Proper attention to your server room air conditioning to ensure your data centre however big or small stays up and running is as an essential part of your business practices as your workforce. Here we identify the hazards to your equipment if you do not use air conditioning.
Installing Air Conditioning in Server Rooms
Computers don’t like it hot
But they do get hot and they then don’t work as well and often break down or crash.
We know the cost of loss of information and the impact of downtime.
Installing air conditioning in a server room will increase efficiency and extend the life of the equipment, as well as reduce possibility of failure and bring down service and maintenance costs.
Server rooms get notoriously hot due the sheer volume of equipment operating inside them. It’s of extreme importance to keep your server room air conditioned to optimum temperature.
Heat
Demanding and constant operations bring increased fire risk and equipment failure caused by overheating.
Expert guidelines on temperature vary but in general, they agree temperature should be maintained above 50 degrees F with an ambient temperature of 68 to 72 degrees F the optimum. All agree the ambient temperature should never exceed 80 degrees F.
Humidity
High humidity affects the performance of server room equipment almost as much as high heat. Moisture build up inside equipment can cause corrosion and rust, which leads to breakdown eventually with serious repair or replacement costs. The ideal humidity levels are lower than 55%, which is not too much of an issue in most climates, but in especially humid areas of the world, it is a significant problem.
Replacing servers ruined by heat and humidity is a cost saving option some companies have tried reckoning it is cheaper to replace equipment than run air conditioning in their computer rooms. The days of down time, restoring data, installing replacement equipment and catching up on a backlog of work was not as cost saving as they thought.
However, a dedicated server room air conditioning solution is more affordable than you would imagine and with the sophisticated energy saving technology available these days, enormous savings can be made on the cost of your system. It is important to choose the right system for your server room and this is where your professional air conditioning specialist can help. With years of server room installation and maintenance experience, they will be able to give you several competitive quotes and figures showing payback period and the savings that can be made over older style air conditioning units.
Another thing to remember is that is your servers are too hot they will not process data as fast as they could if they were operating in optimum air temperatures which means the inbuilt cooling systems are not over stressed either. The cost of air conditioning outweighs the costs of repair, maintenance, and equipment outages.
Remember also that your insurers may insist on air conditioning as a health and safety requirement to protect against fire (see your individual policy). IT is worthwhile protecting your IT assets and to save yourself additional cost and disruption to the business.
