Your IT equipment lives on mains electricity, and converts some of that energy into heat as it works for you.
Mains power is not always clean and stable – even in places where you don’t necessarily see flickering lights, brownouts etc.
Dirty power accounts for many IT equipment failures and can significantly shorten the life of sensitive elctronics such as those storing your data and running your critical systems.
It’s important to work adequate power filtering and power resiliency into your IT systems in order to avoid undermining an otherwise well-implemented system.
UPSes, ATSes, rack PDUs, dual power supply cabling structure, labelling and considered hierarchical power distribution board and circuit breaker design are all important and must be designed, installed and maintained to avoid faults occurring, usually despite best intentions.
A large number of completely avoidable outages occur due to loose power cables, devices connected to only one supply or accidentally bypassing UPS backup. And from shared circuit breakers being tripped by non IT equipment, causing power cuts to critical devices.
On the Cooling front – waste heat from your IT equipment can build up quickly in closed rooms, cupboards, unattended areas on hot days etc. And even well ventilated areas could be doing so at the expense of dust and contaminants being funnelled through your equipment, blocking fans and leading to faults.
Cooling is also an operational expense that can be considerable, and solutions are often an afterthought, resulting in unnecessarily inefficient operation.
Sometimes, the operation savings of a well-designed cooling and power upgrade can themselves cover the cost of implementation, and over time subsidise other upgrades.
Having build many small server rooms from the ground up, and running a small, resilient Data Centre of our own with efficient and redundant power and cooling- we are well placed to recommend and build solutions for our clients.
