scope:

Introduction

Over the years, the power density of electronic equipment has steadily increased, as shown and projected in Figure 1.1. 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 the data center. The Industry Thermal Consortium produced the first project of heat density trends. The IT subcommittee of ASHRAE Technical Committee (TC) 9.9 is the successor of that industry consortium. Figure 1.1 shows the latest projection from the IT subcommittee and is based on best estimates of heat release for fully configured systems. An updated set of power trend charts is published in the second edition of Datacom Equipment Power Trends and Cooling Applications, Second Edition (ASHRAE 2012). These updated equipment power trends extend to 2020 as shown for the 1U server, in Figure 1.2.

The objective of Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments, Third Edition is to

• 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 the 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, and

• provide the basis for measuring the effect of any changes intended to save energy in the data center.

This book, which was generated by ASHRAE TC 9.9, provides equipment manufacturers and facility operations personnel with a common set of guidelines for environmental conditions. It is important to recognize that the IT subcommittee is made up of subject matter experts from the major IT equipment manufacturers. It is the intent of ASHRAE TC 9.9 to update this document regularly.