scope:

Introduction

Over the years, the power density of electronic equipment has steadily increased. In addition, the mission-critical nature of computing has sensitized businesses to the health of their data centers. The combination of these effects makes it obvious that better alignment is needed between equipment manufacturers and facility operations personnel to ensure proper and fault-tolerant operation within data centers.

This need was recognized by an industry consortium in 1999 that began a grassroots effort to provide a power density road map and to work toward standardizing power and cooling of the equipment for seamless integration into a data center. The Industry Thermal Management Consortium produced the first projection of heat density trends. The IT Subcommittee of ASHRAE Technical Committee (TC) 9.9 is the successor of that industry consortium. An updated set of power trend charts was published in IT Equipment Power Trends, Third Edition (ASHRAE 2018b). These updated equipment power trends extend to 2025.

The objective of Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments, Fifth Edition, is to do the following:

• Provide standardized operating environments for equipment

• Provide and define a common environmental interface for the equipment and its surroundings

• Provide guidance on how to evaluate and test the operational health of a data center

• Provide a methodology for reporting the environmental characteristics of a computer system

• Guide data center owners and operators in making changes in the data center environment

• Provide the basis for measuring the effect of any changes intended to save energy in data centers

This book provides equipment manufacturers and facility operations personnel with a common set of guidelines for environmental conditions. It is important to recognize that the ASHRAE TC 9.9 IT Subcommittee is made up of subject matter experts from the major information technology equipment (ITE) manufacturers. It is the intent of ASHRAE TC 9.9 to update this book regularly.

Unless otherwise stated, the thermal guidelines in this document refer to data center and other data-processing environments. Telecom central offices are discussed in detail in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard ETSI EN 300 019-1-3 (2014), which is referenced when there is a comparison between data centers and telecom rooms. It is important to show the comparison where some convergence in these environments may occur in the future.