scope:

Introduction

Over the years, the power density of electronic equipment has been steadily increasing, as shown and projected. In addition, the mission critical nature of computing has sensitized businesses to the health of their data centers. The combination of these effects has made it obvious that better alignment is needed between equipment manufacturers and facility operations personnel to ensure proper and fault tolerant operation within the data center. This need was recognized by an industry consortium in 1999 when they started a grassroots effort to provide a power density road map as well as work toward standardizing power and cooling of the equipment for seamless integration into the data center. Figure 1.1 is based on best estimates of heat release for fully configured systems.

This document is intended:

1. To provide standardized operating environments for equipment. This is in response to an industry void regarding consistent and current operating conditions (e.g., often legacy conditions from old main frame environmental conditions are used).

2. To provide a common environmental interface for the equipment and its surroundings.

3. To provide guidance on how to evaluate and test the operational health of the data center.

4. To provide a methodology for reporting the environmental characteristics of a computer system.

This document, which was generated by ASHRAE Technical Committee 9.9, provides equipment manufacturers and facility operations personnel with a common set of guidelines for environmental conditions. It is the intent of ASHRAE TC 9.9 to regularly update this document. Future revisions and related documents will expand into areas not covered here.

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 Telcordia NEBS™1 documents GR-63-CORE[2] and GR- 3028-CORE [3], as well as ANSI T1.304-1997 [4] and the European ETSI standards [5][6]. The NEBS documents are referenced when there is a comparison between data centers and telecom rooms. These two equipment environments have historically been very different. Nevertheless, it is important to show the comparison where some convergence in these environments may occur in the future.