INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA
INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA
Ensuring data centre
cleanliness: Flawless
facilities, flawless performance
Data centre leaders must ensure their facilities are well maintained and
advanced cleaning methods are used to ensure they can operate to the best of
their ability. Mike Meyer, Managing Director at Critical Facilities Solutions UK,
explains why having a clean data centre is essential for faultless performance.
As home to mission-critical
equipment, it’s easy to see
why you’d want your facility to
be as contaminate-free and
well maintained as possible. Yet, even
with the necessary procedures in place,
contamination still occurs. Everyday
activities such as running cooling
systems, employees opening and closing
doors, installing new equipment – are
all activities that introduce various levels
of contamination.
Maintaining your data centre should
take a ‘minimise, regulate and maintain’
approach to contamination control and
cleaning, but how do you find a cleaning
schedule and programme that is in line
with your operational goals?
Hardware manufacturers such as IBM,
EMC and Dell recommend you maintain
your environment to ISO14644-1:2015
Class 8 utilising professional data centre
cleaners. In fact, failing to do so may
void your warranty in instances where
preventable airborne contamination was
found to be a cause of the device failure.
ASHRAE recommends having an annual
sub-floor clean and quarterly floor and
equipment surface cleaning. Many of
the ‘standards’ and ‘recommendations’
seemingly contradict one another.
Nevertheless, a clean data centre is
essential and here’s why. Airborne
contaminants are the unnoticed threat –
the trouble with them is that the source
(or sources) isn’t always easy to identify
and harmful build-up can occur over the
course of days, months, or even years.
You might not see the source, but
airborne and contact-based contaminants
build up on equipment. Even solid-state
storage mediums can be compromised
by build-up on heat sinks, bearings
and vents. There’s no such thing as
an air-proof data centre. Therefore,
contamination from airborne sources
is – for all intents and purposes –
unavoidable. Electrostatic dust, corrosive
oxides, volatile organic compounds,
solvents and other contaminants put
equipment at risk. Even seemingly
mundane, everyday sources of
contamination such as pollen, dust,
hair and carpeting fibres can prove
to be problematic.
Periodic indoor air quality testing,
otherwise known as air particle testing,
has long been the best and only
method for ascertaining and confirming
compliance to the ISO standard for
machine room and data centre air
cleanliness. The faults with this method
www.intelligentdatacentres.com Issue 17
21