ASHRAE Journal - December 2011 - 42

Data Center Environments O By Robin A. Steinbrecher, Member ASHRAE; and Roger Schmidt, Ph.D., Member ASHRAE ASHRAE’s Evolving Thermal Guidelines ver the last decade, data centers housing large numbers 2008,1 data center efﬁciency improveof servers have become significant power consumers. ority. ments have become an even higher priThe original Thermal Guidelines were Manufacturers of information technology equipment (ITE) continue written by representatives from the ITE to increase compute capability while at the same time improving its of the components in the ITE. The compute efficiency. On the support side, various parties including ITE manufacturers, physical infrastructure manufacturers, data center designers and operators have focused on reducing power consumption from the non-compute part of the overall power load, which is the power and cooling infrastructure that supports the ITE. ASHRAE Technical Committee 9.9, Mission Critical Facilities, Technology Spaces and Electronic Equipment, brings together the disparate interests in the data center industry in the area of data center cooling technologies. Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing En42 ASHRAE Journal manufacturers who understood the limobjective at the time was to create a common set of environmental parameters that would ensure adequate reliability and performance within reasonable cost constraints. To address the growing concerns about energy efﬁciency, particularly the cooling component, TC 9.9 has been evolving the Thermal Guidelines toward wider temperature and humidity ranges. About the Authors Robin A. Steinbrecher is a server thermal architect with Intel in Dupont, Wash. Roger Schmidt, Ph.D., is an IBM fellow and chief engineer for Data Center Energy Efficiency in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and past chair of ASHRAE TC 9.9, Mission Critical Facilities, Technology Spaces and Electronic Equipment. vironments helped create a framework to enable the industry to speak a common language and better understand the implications of ITE cooling requirements on the data center and vice versa. Since ASHRAE ﬁrst issued the Thermal Guidelines in 2004 and updated them in ashrae.org December 2011

ASHRAE Journal - December 2011

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