design & facilities management
Cooling towers and air handling
units draw in air from the
outside that is potentially full of
dust, leaves and pollen, all of
which can clog system filters.
COOL SOLUTION
Data centre failure can be cripplingly expensive – according to one estimate, just a single
minute of downtime can cost around £5,500. Effective maintenance has a huge role to
play in keeping data centres running, but, more than that, it helps save energy, says
John Grenville of ECEX.
A
ll the numbers
surrounding
information
technology are
mind blowing.
For example, in 1968, a single
transistor cost US $1; today, the
same amount will buy you 50 million
transistors. The first computer chip,
built in the early1970s, contained
30
2,300 transistors; Intel now
routinely produces chips containing
a billion.
The world’s first digital computer,
the Harvard Mark I, developed
in the mid-1940s, could perform
three additions or subtractions in a
second, and a single multiplication
took six seconds; today, there is a
supercomputer in the US that can
perform more than a quadrillion (one
thousand million million) calculations
every second.
And, just recently, a computer
won a 4-1 victory against the world’s
top human player of Go (a hideously
difficult board game far more complex
than chess), which demands not only
strategic thinking, but also intuition
and creativity.