Chillin' in the Data Center

Halloween may be over, but data center managers should not be surprised if they get a chill running down their spines, according to Alan Hedge, professor of ergonomics at Cornell University.

Hedge is currently studying the impact of chilly surroundings on worker productivity, and warns that data centers pose a major problem for businesses. By cooling the environment too much you are losing performance,” he says, claiming that data center staff "performance could be deteriorating and they might not realize it.”

This is serious stuff: Hedge and his team have embarked on a two-year research project sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency no less, to examine the effect of workplace temperatures and airborne pollutants on employees.

As the first part of his research, Hedge studied employee performance at the Altamonte Spings, Fla., headquarters of the Insurance Office of America. The Cornell study found that, when office temperature was cut from 77 degrees to 68 degrees, typing mistakes by staff rose from 10 percent to 25 percent. Overall typing output also fell by 47 percent.

Hedge believes that the findings could have a significant impact in data centers, which rely on a wide range of cooling equipment to prevent servers from overheating (see It's All Cool and Data Center Heat Wave).”Companies have to monitor what the conditions are like,” he says. “Often in a data center you will have one thermostat, but you need more than that to find what the variations in conditions are.”

As well as improving their monitoring procedures, firms also need to think about where their staff are located within the data center. For example, the need to circulate cool air around the data center poses a potential headache. “You shouldn’t position people underneath the ventilation supply ducts." [Ed. note: nor, we might add, underneath the raw sewage outflow pipe.]

The U.K.-born boffin also suggests partitioning the data center to separate staff and technology. “It’s fairly inexpensive to do -- you could use a glass partition to create a thermal barrier."

But heat is not the only thing that Hedge and his team up in Ithaca, N.Y., are concerned about. The two-year study is also focusing on the effects of air pollutants produced by PCs and servers. If carbon-based compounds are present in sufficient numbers they can lead to headaches, eye irritations, and even breathing difficulties, according to Hedge.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum0