THERMAL IMAGING FOR DATA CENTERS
Data center maintenance teams have a big share in safeguarding the critical resource that customers and businesses depend upon. Fortunately, they have one secret weapon that enables them to spot issues in an early stage before they turn into big problems: FLIR thermal imaging.
services, including Outlook, which led to services being lost for 16 hours.
Overheated circuit breaker
FLIR Exx-Series
Maintenance thermal imaging cameras
The maintenance of a data center today involves much more than IT operations. Power distribution systems and cooling infrastructure are also essential for keeping the data center up and running, and for preventing mechanical or electrical failures and resulting outages.
The data center market has seen a massive growth in recent years. Spurred by a growing adoption of cloud technologies, AI, IoT, 5G and big data, new data centers are being built across all continents at fast pace.
Whether they are in-house data centers for some of the largest and most influential companies, or built by specialized vendors offering infrastructure services, data centers fulfill a critical role in maintaining the continuity of a business. Downtime of a data center can have an enormous economic impact and needs to be avoided at all costs. In addition to financial loss, reputational damage can be equally impactful, especially when the data center is supporting customer-facing services.
Guaranteeing uptime has become increasingly complex for data centers. With so much mechanical, electrical and electronic infrastructure under one roof, overheating is a major concern, not only because the infrastructure is not using the energy efficiently, but also because overheating can cause a complete shutdown of servers, impacting users around the world, or even data or equipment loss. One of the most reported incidents is the 2013 overheating of a Microsoft data center operating some of its cloud
Many systems that are critical for the data center’ s operation heat up before they fail. Temperature is an important indicator of energy consumption and equipment operation, which is why infrared thermography( thermal imaging) is an ideal tool to inspect power consumption, electrical installations, cooling equipment and computing hardware.
Periodic inspections with a thermal imaging camera have become indispensable in predictive and preventive maintenance programs. Thermal cameras help maintenance staff to detect problems in electrical switchgear, motors, HVAC infrastructure, uninterruptible power supplies( UPS), power distribution units( PDU), batteries and generator equipment and all electrical devices that feed the server systems, before these problems turn into serious failures or downtime.
With cloud computing becoming the new normal, and as data centers are growing to great scales, the need for higher computing density and power efficiency is growing as well. Data center owners are seeking ways to increase their capacity, but they also want to reduce costs and energy. Thermal imaging can give them important information on how to optimize energy and space requirements, without causing
46 AUTOMATION, CONTROL & ENGINEERING