Building a Better Future by Designing Data Centers for Heatwave Resiliency - Part 1

Protecting our important data center infrastructure and making it resilient through extreme weather events is critical to our modern operating world. We must approach designing new buildings and retrofitting existing data center infrastructure to be able to withstand extreme temperatures with a sense of urgency.

Why data centers need to consider climate as part of their design? 

Data centers have become one of the most important aspects of our infrastructure. Nearly all businesses rely on data centers to keep operations running. And while the importance of well-designed data centers can be easy to forget when it works seamlessly in the background, if a data center fails, it can be a major incident.

Building resiliency into data centers to ensure constant uptime is among the highest priorities for data center operations. But this resiliency is increasingly challenged as our climate changes and temperatures rise. This summer, London learned first-hand how detrimental overheating can be when critical data centers failed during an unprecedented heatwave.

Considering data centers are being built in places where extreme heat and lack of water are the norm, these types of unprecedented events are likely to become increasingly common. For large installations with many chillers, the immense amount of heat rejected can create a microclimate where the temperatures reach even higher.

The good news is, consulting with trusted thermal management during the design phase can help ensure your data center will withstand drastic temperature shifts while using minimal water and maintaining efficiency and sustainability. We need to design our data center infrastructure for any extreme weather events – our businesses, communities, and society depend on it.

To learn how to approach designing a data center to withstand extreme weather conditions, read part 2 of our series.