Is your cooling solution built for your data centre or server room needs? Or only adapted to them? Comfort cooling systems consist of central air conditioners in offices and other commercial buildings. They are primarily designed to balance temperature and humidity in order to keep people comfortable. Precision cooling systems are designed to strictly regulate atmospheric conditions within a very narrow range to provide a stable environment for sensitive electronics.
Although comfort cooling solutions are initially less expensive to implement, the overall total cost of ownership can be higher than with precision air conditioning both in terms of operational expense and costs associated with increased downtime.
People can handle fluctuations in temperature or humidity, but IT equipment cannot. Today’s higher-density data centre or server room deployments have far more demanding requirements than did yesterday’s mainframes. The following list delineates how the cooling requirements for an IT environment are quite different from those for an office environment.
1. Heat load profile
Almost the entire cooling load in an IT environment (such as a data centre or server room) is dry (sensible) heat thrown off by the equipment. Consequently, the air conditioner should primarily cool the air, now lower humidity. The required “sensible heat ratio” for a data centre or server room air conditioner is very high, 095-0.99. Comfort air conditioners typically have a sensible heat ratio of only 0.65-0.70, which means that they remove too much moisture from the air. Continuous re-humidification would be needed to maintain the required atmospheric conditions for IT equipment.
2. Heat load density
The heat density of an IT environment may be five times higher and far less uniform that that of a typical office. Precision air conditioning manages the increased load by maintaining a higher sensible heat ratio and operating at a much higher airflow rate which means more air is moved through the space to ensure a more even distribution of air and reduce the chances of localised hot spots in a data centre or server room.
3. Temperature and humidity control
Precision air conditioners have sophisticated, fast-acting microprocessor-based controls that react quickly to maintain strictly regulated set-point target temperature (+1oF/+.56oC and humidity (+4% levels).
Comfort air conditioners simply are not designed to maintain such precise control over the temperature or relative humidity that can be created in such environments as data centres or server rooms or to react with the necessary speed to rapidly changing conditions.
4. Year-round operation
Precision cooling systems are built to run nonstop, 24/7, 365 days a year 8,760 hours annually. They are designed to incorporate redundancy and respond to the full range of outside ambient temperatures.
Comfort cooling systems are not designed to run continuously or to operate in winter conditions. They are meant for summertime or use during normal business hours (9 to 5, five days a week), up to an expected maximum of 1,200 hours per year. Comfort air conditioners quickly lose efficiency and break down under the strain of nonstop operation.
5. Air quality
Comfort air conditioners typically employ inefficient residential-style flat air filters, which are inadequate to remove a sufficient percentage of air-borne particles.
Precision air conditioners on the other hand, use deep-pleated, higher-efficiency filter banks that sufficiently minimise dust and other particles that can damage sensitive IT equipment that may be found in data centres or server rooms.
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