DATA CENTRES Data protection
To operate effectively, data centres need to run in a safe, energy efficient, and sustainable way. Achieving this requires them to cope with the build- up of heat. But what are its sources and how can they be neutralised? Tim Mitchell, sales director of Klima-Therm, has some answers.
H
eat is the nemesis of data centres because it can destroy delicate equipment containing mission critical information which can, in turn, devastate or even obliterate a business. Adding further to the threat, computing equipment that overheats poses a significant fire hazard. For these two reasons alone, nullifying the effects of heat in data centres is an absolutely central element of their design. In order to remove heat, however, its source must first be identified.
The most important source is the heat
generated by the equipment itself. The temperature range in the aisles of a typical data centre is between 26 and 46°C. A large data centre could produce 20 to 50MW of heat and this must be dissipated. But the threat from heat doesn’t end there;
the risks can be intensified by the weather. The increasingly frequent high temperatures we have been experiencing over the last few years have exacerbated the challenge of data centre cooling. As if we didn’t already know, a recent report
from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has confirmed that “it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land” (https://bit. ly/3V39nQi). Average global land temperatures have
risen by more than 1°C since the Industrial Revolution which began in 1760. As a result of this baseline increase in temperature, we are seeing extreme heat events, such as heatwaves and record-breaking high temperatures, become more frequent, long- lasting, and intense.
The top 10 warmest years for the UK since 1884 have occurred since 2002, according to the Met Office. In contrast, none of the coldest years have been recorded this century. The highest temperature ever recorded in the UK is 40.3°C, set in Coningsby, Lincolnshire in July 2022. But this record is likely to be broken in the not-too-distant future as the planet suffers further effects of global warming. Indeed, the World Meteorological
Organization warns that there’s a 93% chance that a year between now and 2026 will be the hottest on record (
https://bit.ly/3CwsdYS) and this will not be a one-off. The extreme weather events we have been
experiencing have real-world consequences. The UK’s summer heat wave, for example, saw a Google cloud data centre in London forced offline due to what the company described as a ‘cooling-related failure’. And US software giant Oracle, which also has a London-based cloud data centre, also cited a cooling malfunction caused by ‘unreasonable’ temperatures (
https://bit.ly/3V4iMqU). In order to function properly, data
centres need to remain cool. According to US standards body ASHRAE, servers and other computer equipment should operate in temperatures between 18°C and 27°C although some experts recommend the lower temperature limit in server rooms should be 10°C to avoid damaging delicate IT equipment.
But the demand to keep data centres cool is made even more challenging by the need to control energy costs and carbon emissions. Modern data centres are voracious consumers of vast amounts of electricity for cooling. Data centres and data transmission networks accounted for 1 to 1.5% of global electricity use in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency.
This – and the fact that these mission critical systems tend to operate 24 hours a day, seven
20 November 2022 •
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