The hidden cost of poor cleaning £ 15 CHTMAG.COM CLEANING HYGIENE TODAY Data centre managers are faced with a number of competing priorities when it comes to maximising the efficiency of their data centres, and traditionally data centre cleaning may not have been high on the list. However failure to clean data centres properly could be potentially disastrous in terms of maximising performance and minimising cost. Brendan Musgrove, managing director, Cordant Specialist Services explains more The bottom line requirement of minimising downtime is put at risk if dust is not dealt with, for example it can clog up heatsinks on servers’ microchips, causing them to overheat and shortening their service life. And this is not only about in-house data centres, the risks of not making cleaning a core part of maintenance are equally acute for co-located facilities. The range of contaminant particles is as varied as the items contained within the data centre, and its users. Data centres are dynamic, live environments and though human activity can be minimised, it will still occur, whether it is walking through the centre, opening cage doors or moving boxed equipment. All of these will mean displacement of additional dust, fibres or metal filings in the environment to deal with. Data centres have become more and more common over the last few decades. More and more common and much, much larger. An entire industry has grown around the specialist cleaning requirements needed to maintain data centres. This is hardly surprising, after all a large data centre has a capacity to use as much electricity as a small town in the United States. To give you a bit of background, Data centres account for 17 per cent of carbon footprint of the global Information and communication technology sector. The average life of a data centre is considered to be nine years and four of the biggest five can be found in the USA, with the other in China. As for individual sites, Microsoft built a data centre in 2013 at a cost of $112 million. Google’s data centres use around 260 million watts of power which accounts to 0.01 per cent of global energy. This power is enough to consistently power 200,000 homes. Amazon utilises 450,000 servers across seven locations worldwide. Finally the secretive NSA database stores so much data that they speak in terms of “Yottabytes” and “Zettabytes.” With the rapid expansion in data centres, cleaning companies have at times struggled to keep pace and may use regular offices cleaning techniques in these sensitive environments. This approach can sabotage data centre efficiency, purely as a result of lack of knowledge of how much maintaining correct cleaning regimes can affect the operation. Regardless of environmental and operational controls, data centres will over time accumulate dust and other contaminants. These represent a constant challenge that requires specialist cleaning knowledge to ensure best practice maintenance. This potentially very costly danger is somewhat hidden, because these are microscopically small particles, but they can cause significant issues. New, more efficient designs of cooling systems are a doubleedged sword” SPECIALIST FEATURE OCTOBER 2015 “
Cleaning Hygiene Today October 2015
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