* By Otto Pohlmann
The technological heart of every company has a first and last name: data center, or, if you prefer, data processing center. In times of digital acceleration and agility in the proliferation of information, these computational systems have become “the new oil” and keep all the gears working. Therefore, with the approach of the hottest season of the year, paying attention to high temperatures is essential to avoid structural and internal damage to equipment and, above all, data loss.
Us data centers, processing and storage devices are located that take care of all the information of a company, such as data about customers, employees, etc. The structure of the data center is physical and houses switches, servers, routers and storages. Its size varies and can include thousands of servers and databases.
To get an idea of the importance of maintaining humidity and temperature control in these places, one of the main data centers from twitter, located in Sacramento, California, recently stopped working due to the high temperatures that the state faced.
In fact, as a reference organization, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has created a set of thermal guidelines. It is necessary, for example, that the environment maintain the relative humidity between 45% and 55% and the temperature below 30 °C. In addition, the ISO/IEC nº 11.801 standard, for structured cabling for telecommunications, also values the conservation of hardware in environments with a temperature between −10 °C and 60 °C and without contact with moisture or other corrosive elements.
Given the whole context, we list some of the main problems caused by the lack of temperature and humidity control in the environments of a data center:
Oxidation of wires and power cables
When relative humidity is high, server cabling is more likely to oxidize. Thus, the system may suffer from the downtime, which is the downtime of a server. This prevents it from processing the information and, therefore, causes financial losses to the companies. It was the case of data center of Facebook in 2011. The company's first data center recorded a humidity of 95%, which led to several hardware crashes and lost servers.
Short circuits and fires
In environments like these, the chances of recording temperatures of 60ºC are high. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out the correct air conditioning. If measures are not taken, a short circuit in the servers can cause fires, which can quickly spread throughout the premises.
data loss
Structural and financial losses are inevitable when a serious problem occurs in data centers. Incidents are not uncommon and immeasurable damage happens. Last year, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had one of its Availability Zones in Frankfurt shut down for about three hours when the air circulation systems in the data center failed. The incident escalated when a fire suppression system was engaged and the data center had to be evacuated. The fire suppression system removed oxygen from the air, so for an hour or so, the crew was unable to enter the data hall to fix the glitch, making the outage even longer.
As can be seen, the data centers directly reflect on all sectors of a company. Therefore, ensuring that these environments are well-structured and prioritize temperature and humidity control allows the business to function fully and safely.
*Otto Pohlmann is CEO of Centric Solution
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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