Yes, an employee and the correct resources are what makes or breaks a company. But have you ever given a thought to all the technical parts that make your regular working flow smooth? Just like lights cannot function without a generator, a company cannot function without a server room. But, have you ever noticed that whenever you enter the server room, they are quite hot as compared to the outside temperature. This is because there are so many pieces of equipment being used at the same time together with so much consumption of electricity; it is bound to get heated. However, if the temperature is not controlled and the server room overheats then there are chances of a downtime, loss of productivity and loss of data and all this is bad news.
No one would have thought that temperature of a server room can be of this importance. If not given due attention, then it can definitely hamper your working. So, in order to avoid such situations, precautionary measures should be taken at the initial stages only. Also, it is essential to keep in mind that it does not matter whether how small or big the room is, if the room gets heated up above the set temperature, there will sure shot be a downtime. In fact, in most of the cases, small rooms have been reported to be the cause of a system failure that this is because they have a very narrow path for adequate airflow. Therefore, to avoid all these we have created a list of best practices and tips to follow in order to maintain your server room cool.
- Centralized air conditioning: For this, firstly you need to check for adequate intake and return vents so that even when the door is closed, air is able to flow adequately. The second check goes into comparing the ambient temperature and set temperature of the room. It should be noted that these two temperatures should not have much difference. Only a difference of one or two degrees is enough.
- Hot and Cold Aisle: Placement of your equipment also plays a major role in keeping your server rooms in case you have multiple server racks. This ideally should be in a way that the front side of the server should be facing each other to draw cold air from the cold aisle and the rear side of the rows of rack face one another, expelling hot air in the hot aisle. This is done to avoid any flow of hot air in the cold aisle inlet so as to maintain the temperature.
- Seal your server room: This means that you need to fully pack your room with no windows, no missing tiles, no gaps or cracks or any other space from which the air can escape. This is required so that the outside air does not make their way inside and vice versa. Additionally, you will need a dedicated AC unit and precision cooling appliance.
- Use server rooms for a dedicated purpose: Do not use your server room as a storage to store any other office equipment or stationary. This is because more things in the room will consume more AC to keep the air flow. Make sure to not use the server room for day-to-day activities and keep it locked as much as possible to maintain the environmental conditions.
- Heat emitting lights: There are certain types of bulbs like the incandescent light bulb which heat up the room more than you can imagine. It emits only 10% of the light, rest 90% it goes into creating heat which can heat between 150º to 250º Fahrenheit. That is why it is advisable to use fluorescent lights for such purposes. Nowadays, there are many such lights manufactured which generate less heat and emit more light.
These may seem like small factors but all added up can serve a big purpose. Now that we know the importance of maintaining the temperature in a server room, imagine what role can a quality of the server racks can play? If the quality is compromised, then there more chances of breakdown than due to heating up of server rooms. For the same reason, you can rely on Suntec-it, which is China’s largest server rack manufactures which is known for their thorough QA checks done on the server racks before actually delivering it to the customer. The use the best technology and raw materials to manufacture such server racks. So if you have managed to spend those extra bucks to get a tested server rack, half of your problem is already solved.
