Challenges of building up and maintaining server rooms

The biggest challenges of server rooms at present are connected to continuous growth of energy needs and steep price growth of energy.

At the beginning of 21st century reasonable dimensioning for cooling and UPS backed power chain was 1.000 W/m2. At the moment the need seems to be multiple to that, when servers are to be changed to blade servers.

One server cabinet may produce heat up to 20 kW. So it is not possible anymore build up cooling systems based on circulated cool air, but to use cabinets with modular cooling systems. That means there will be water in the server room.

Rising energy costs are the other challenge. In modern server room 1/3 of electric energy is used to run servers, ½ to run cooling systems and rest of it to energy losses.

There is a system with which server room operators can evaluate the efficiency of electrical energy usage in server rooms. System is Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE). With this tool it is possible to define an efficiency number and to set future targets to increase effectiveness.

We have several server room projects ongoing where these challenges are tackled to meet future needs.

Contact person in server room projects is Tapani Sahlström