Electricity and Control April 2024

INDUSTRY 4.0 + IIOT

Keeping edge data centres cool Jonathan Duncan, Technical Director, Africa at Vertiv Digital transformation is seeing organisations become increasingly reliant on information technology to monitor and run almost every aspect of their business.The creation of more data – which needs to be processed and stored – brings with it the need for more computing power and more data centres.

Jonathan Duncan, Vertiv.

I n many cases, these are not large, purpose-built data centres, but rather, close-proximity smaller, edge facil ities that share space in the same building as the rest of the business. This can create particular challenges with regard to securing the environment and cooling the IT or OT loads. At the edge Edge computing can be described as the concept of having computing and storage capacity physically close to where users are generating, consuming and manipulating data. We are seeing a rise in edge computing (also known as decentralised IT) driven by such factors as: the ongoing rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) – or similarly the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) – which generates significant amounts of data, legal requirements, the need to consolidate data, high network costs, latency issues, and network security requirements. When the time taken in sending data to a centralised or cloud data centre is too long and latency becomes an inhibitor, this drives the need for localised processing capabilities, or edge data centres. However, the edge data centres often have to share an area that is already serving another purpose, and which may not have cooling systems intended to handle the IT equipment at the edge of the network. Checking the cooling requirements IT equipment can produce a lot of heat on a continuous basis. Organisations therefore need to take steps to ensure the proper cooling of the equipment in order to protect it and ensure its constant availability. Placing sensitive IT

cooling system may not meet the stringent requirements for the proper functioning of a data centre. This is especially true for high-density IT equipment, including hyperconverged in frastructure, which can generate large amounts of heat from a relatively small space. Controlled versus uncontrolled environments Companies are now routinely installing edge data centres in two general categories of space: - Controlled office environments, which are geared towards standard comfort cooling for people, and - Uncontrolled environments, such as manufacturing spaces, which may or may not have ambient cooling and humidity control in place. The typical office environment uses room-based cooling systems provided as part of a building’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, or decentralised mini-split cooling systems. Cooling capacity is calculated based on the heat load the comfort cooling system needs to handle, as measured in watts or kilowatts. A typical office HVAC system could have a cooling capacity to deal with a heat load in the range of 50 to 100 W per square metre, or perhaps one to two kilowatts for an entire room. But a single rack of IT equipment may produce a heat load of three to four kW or more. As a result, a cooling system designed for one kW of cooling could be asked to deal with as much as four times that capacity. This is likely to have several repercussions. - Employees may be uncomfortable as the comfort system struggles to maintain a target temperature. - IT equipment (such as servers) often has thermal protection systems that trigger a shutdown if the temperature rises too high. - Overtaxing the comfort HVAC system by requiring it to operate continuously above its rated cooling capacity will drive up operating costs over the long term, and probably also cause its early failure, as it is typically not engineered for continuous operation. Another issue with most office buildings is humidity. With doors and potentially windows opening and closing all the time, humidity levels can change randomly, depending on conditions outside. This is not ideal for IT equipment. Similarly, dust is a concern as it does not support the optimal functioning of IT equipment. That is why purpose built data centres have air filtration systems that remove dust and other particulates from the air. Many companies need to install edge data centres on

equipment into spaces designed originally for some other purpose can present challenges, es pecially with respect to cooling. For example, an office building is optimised to be comfortable for its em ployees; and a more open space, such as a fac tory floor or warehouse, has its own heating and cooling requirements. In either case, the existing

As demand grows for edge data centres in offices, factories and warehouses, suitable cooling is essential for each installation.

4 Electricity + Control APRIL 2024