ASHRAE: Warmer Data Centers Good for Some, Not All

Beaty has grown accustomed to managing the heat. This week marks the release of the latest guidelines on data center cooling from ASHRAE  (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers), which reflect the growing momentum for operating servers at higher levels of temperature and humidity. “Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments” is published by ASHRAE’s Technical Committee (TC) 9.9, which was co-founded by Beaty and IBM’s Roger Schmidt to provide specialized guidance on data center cooling.

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Allowable vs. Recommended ASHRAE Guidelines - Design Your Data Center

The majority of data centers have multiple generations of technology, some type of spinning disc, some type of tape storage and maybe even some mainframe systems.  These data centers can still be extremely energy efficient, but are not going to see the extremes of the ASHRAE design guidelines.  They are the data centers that should probably stay with the ASHRAE recommended guidelines.  Below is an example of the recommended versus allowable ASHRAE Guidelines.  Please note that the recommended temperature guidelines didn’t change in 2011, only the allowable.

•       Temperature

•       2004 – 20C to 25C - Recommended

•       2008 – 18C to 27C - Recommended

•       2011 – 5C to 40C - Allowable

•       Humidity

•       2004 – 40 to 55% - Recommended

•       2008 – 35 to 60% - Recommended

•       2011 – 20 to 80% - Recommended

One thing we are seeing more and more of today is confusion over what temperature and humidity parameters data centers should be designed for.  Most of the discussion seems to assume that there is a monolithic block of data centers that can all be designed the same way.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Most of the data centers in existence today have a mixture of technologies and systems that all have varying environmental requirements.  We typically refer to these as mixed use data centers.  Unlike an E-Bay, Google, Microsoft or Apple data center, there is not rack after rack of the same equipment, all with similar operating requirements.