Data centre efficiency is a hot topic amongst organisations serving multiple industry sectors. In technology-driven industries in particular, both hardware and software play integral parts in the daily running of a business. This makes it imperative to keep IT infrastructure as efficient as possible.
Temperature is one of the most essential considerations. Without the right cooling systems in place, your centre will get very hot very fast, leaving the data within at risk and the equipment storing it vulnerable to breakdown or corruption. In this post, we take a closer look at the importance of getting your data centre temperature just right and pinpoint the optimum temperature so you can keep data centre cooling on point.
Why is a cool data centre important?
Your hardware and software has to work extremely hard to deliver the results you expect at every level of your business. Just like your employees, its productivity is sharply affected by inappropriate working temperatures. Keeping data centres cool is about so much more than cutting the costs of server room cooling. With the right techniques and cooling technology in place you’ll be helping to keep the environment cool too, as BizTech Magazine details:
“’Cooling is by far the biggest user of electrical power in the data center,’ says Steve Carlini, global director of data center solution marketing at Schneider Electric, a vendor of data center power and cooling products. ‘That area may take up to 40 or 50 percent of all the power going into your data center.’ That explains why IT managers use a variety of techniques to ensure that expensive computing equipment does not overheat or that the resulting energy bills do not break the operations budget. The challenges grow as IT managers more densely pack server racks into available real estate, thereby creating hot spots in need of specialized cooling strategies. These techniques start with some simple, common sense measures and extend to ambitious retrofit projects.”
How cool should you go?
Cooling your data centre to the correct temperature is vital, particularly if you are looking to unlock all the benefits of data centre cooling. As server and cooling technologies evolve, the benchmark for the optimum temperature is moving. The latest findings suggest that a data centre room should be between 20 and 21.6°C. Special care must be taken to ensure this temperature does not fall below 10°C or exceed 27.7°C to avoid server failures.
The ideal temperature for your particular server room may vary and can be influenced by a number of factors. The size of the room and the number of servers present, for instance, may influence the optimal temperature. Many organisations also look to strike the right balance between achieving sufficient data centre cooling and limiting energy consumption.
As experts in server room cooling, we help customers with small computer rooms and large, multi-location data centres cool their IT environments to perfection. Discover more about our cooling services and products by getting in touch with our team today on 01992 478 100.
