Data Center’s serve as a bridge in the digital world. The facilities consist of high-density servers that store and process a large amount of data which entails large power consumption and heat generation. The more servers placed in a data center, the higher the temperature can reach.  Large data centers consume enough energy to power a city with a population of 1 million.  Therefore, cooling systems were installed to combat the excess heat.  However, if you have a cooling system that isn’t running effectively, it can cause overheating in the data center.

Equipment failure due to overheating can lead to downtime, and this could impact your entire business operations. For co-location data centers, it can ruin the relationship of the owner and the corporate clients. The consequences of overheating can cost millions of dollars and interrupt business continuity. Therefore, it is important to oversee the optimum temperature to prevent overheating in the data center.

Overheating – A Google and Oracle Case

Cloud services and servers hosted by Google and Oracle in the UK recently dropped offline due to cooling issues in the data center as the country experienced a record-breaking heatwave.

When the temperature hit 104.5F in eastern England on July 19, 2022, data centers couldn't take the heat. Selected machines were powered off to avoid long-term damage, causing some resources, services, and virtual machines to become unavailable, taking down unlucky websites and the like.

Multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources went offline, including networking, storage, and compute provided by its servers in the south of the UK. Cooling systems were blamed, and techies switched off equipment in a bid to prevent hardware burning out.

Ways of Preventing Overheating in the Data Center

Heat is inevitable but overheating is something that can be staved off. By following the practices below, administrators can prevent overheating that can lead to catastrophe. 

  • Manual Temperature Checks :  Even if you have an automatic sensors, hav routine manual checks are important to determine if those sensors are working.
  • Regular Preventative Maintenance : Although servers are a high priority in the data center, the simple fact is that the performance of a server is based on the performance of the HVAC system.  So if your HVAC system doesn’t meet your requirements, overheating will occur.
  • Effective Cooling Systems:  In order to keep your data center operating with the utmost efficiency, an effective cooling system is a “must.” As air flows, it is important to ensure that hot air and cold air do not mix. This practice is one of the most promising energy-efficiency measures available to new and legacy data centers today.

Are newer, high-density servers too much for older rack cooling technology?

Older rack cooling technology might not handle higher server density well. In a data center, the cooling system's capability must equal the heat from server density for proper performance; an older system may be inadequately matched to cool higher server densities. Since vendors are building energy-efficient technology into new server platforms, compute capacity can grow while the cooling system stays the same. 

What are your options to recycle old servers?                         

When data center equipment is unable to perform adequately, it is time to replace it with newer, more proficient hardware. Getting rid of those old servers means careful IT asset disposal must be implemented and we highly recommend that you Work with an IT Asset Disposal (ITAD) vendor that will help take care of the entire asset recovery process for you.

OceanTech, the most trusted provider in the ITAD industry, will ensure that servers, or any other IT equipment that you have that still holds market value, will be sanitized of all data and refurbished to ensure maximum return on all of your IT assets.