Climatic conditions and ecosystem requirements for DPCs

System of artificial climate

The system of artificial climate – a separate system and it most differs from the typical equipment used in the majority of premises: feature of the premises of DPC - that servers require permanent, round-the-clock cooling and the heat sink even if the data processing center is placed with a pole. The solution of this engineering task will require the special equipment which consumes the considerable volume of the electric power.

In passing it is worth noticing that sometimes there is a need for protection of DPC not only from external factors of risk, but also the environment from influence of the equipment of DPC. In particular, from noisy servers. In certain cases the additional noise isolation of premises of DPC can be required.

Technologies of cooling in DPCs

Main article: Technologies of cooling in DPCs

Risks of damage in data centers

Humidity, but without having heated, is the biggest danger to hard drives

It appears, the humidity is a big threat for reliability of hard drives than high temperatures, according to the research Rutgers University with the assistance of GoDaddy and Microsoft which results were published in March, 2016^[1]. In the document entitled "Environmental conditions and reliability of hard drives in data centers with ambient cooling" (at such type of cooling to the premises the purified fresh air for economy of energy on conditioners moves), the group of researchers claims that the most important result is that in addition to all other conditions, impact on controllers and adapters were most of all felt in process of growth of level of humidity.

Data center of Google in the district Douglas, the State of Georgia, the USA

In the report it is said that big operators of data centers can report on coefficient of annual efficiency of use of energy (Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)) from 1.1 to 1.2 that means what only from 10% to 20% of energy is spent for not computer needs, such as cooling. This considerable improvement in comparison with indicators of seven-year prescription when PUE was equal to about 3.0. One of methods to lower PUE "direct-evaporating-cooling" or in other words "ambient cooling" is called.

Direct vaporizing cooling reduces temperature using the latent heat of evaporation which turns liquid water into water vapor. In process, it can increase relative humidity in data center up to 90%. The data center then should get rid of this humidity not to turn into the swamp. At some point, the humidity cannot increase further and evaporation will stop.

According to a research, on breakdowns of disks 89% of breakdowns of component parts in data center, are the share of RAM of 10%, of processors (CPU) - 5% and for power supplies (PSU) - 2%. The research showed that when the level of humidity increased, the level of breakdowns of hard drives and errors of communication increased.

The test was carried out more than on one million disks in nine data centers of Microsoft, for from 1.5 to 4 years. The number of the breakdowns connected with humidity was so high that you could tell in what data centers with ambient cooling there was humidity monitoring and in what it was not, simply having looked at annual failure ratio of hard drives.

One of outputs of group of researchers was that in the data centers located in regions with the high level of natural humidity there has to be stricter control over humidity level. They also found out that the arrangement of hard drives in hot regions in a back part of the server increased their reliability. The reason is that heating is not so destructive as it humidity and heating of a disk in such provision in the server constrained increase in humidity.

However, researchers also found out that in certain cases, cheaper to change hard drives than to be spent for expensive control systems of humidity. Therefore if you decide just to allow them to break and change them, you will need more reliable restoration system of data to be ready to failures of disks.

Management of data center is the interesting and developing science. For several years before, Intel placed data center in the desert of Arizona and used only external air for cooling instead of turning DPC in myasokhranilishche as it usually becomes. It did not yield either losses, or problems. Data centers can sustain heating. They, however, cannot cope with dust.

See Also

• Overview of TAdviser: Commercial DPCs
• Data processing center (data center)
• Key services based on DPC
• Colocation
• Russian market of DPC
• Trends in the Russian market of data centers
• Cloud services (market of Russia)
• Russian IaaS market
• What is "green" data center?
• Measurement of profitability of DPC
• Container DPCs
• Technologies for DPC: Solid state drives (SSD)
• World market of DPC

Notes