FAQs - Server Rooms

A server room is a dedicated space within a building in which an organisations places the IT servers, storage and switches at the hear of its IT operation. The server room will provide a secure and managed environment utilising critical infrastructure and support systems. These will include critical power (uninterruptible power supplies), cooling (air conditioning), fire suppression and environmental monitoring for temperature, humidity and water leakage. Access to the room itself my be managed via an access control system, and this may alo provide additional secure access to the server racks.

In a server room, server racks are used to house the 19inch rack mount servers, storage and IT devices. A server rack provides a secure and easy to manage wya to organise the rackmounted devices. A server room will have at least one or more server racks and for a small-to-medium sized business or organisation the number of server racks could be 10 or more. This number could reach one hundred or more dependent upon the size of the business or organisation and its computing needs. KVM switches are used to manage the server network within the server room or remotely.

A data centre is an entire building dedicated to the management and operation of the server rooms or data halls within and servces no other purpose. Data centres can provide IT service to the organisation that owns it, referred to as an Enterprise data centre or be a colocation data centre that provide services including rack hosting, server hosting and web hosting. A colocation data centre operator owns the hardware and rents space to clients.

Server rooms and data centres are designed to be resilient with metrics used to measure their availability and energy efficiency. They are designed to achieve a level of availability using N+X redundancy in ther crtiical infrastructure systems. The most commonly used rating system for data centre resilience is the Uptime Institute’s Tier-rating and for energy efficiency Power Usage Effectiveness by the Green Grid.

The term data centre, may also be written as datacentre or in the United States as a data center or datacenter.

A data centre is a building dedicated to providing IT server operations either to an organisation (enterprise data centre) or to external clients (colocation data centre). The data centre provides a secure, managed and controlled environment for IT operations including resilience and uptime through the provision of critical infrastructure systems (critical power, cooling and fire suppression), access control and environmental monitoring for temperature, humidity and water leakage. A data centre can have one or more server rooms or data halls within its building. In a colocation data centre, these may be rented out, in whole or in part, to specific clients who want to run their servers and computing network needs off-site to their principle place of work. Data backup, disaster recovery, webhosting and cloud-based software applications are common examples of services provided by a colocation data centre.

Edge data centres are located close to the information user and provide cloud computing and cached data content to their end-users, faster than can be provided from a centralised data centre. Edge data centres operate at the ‘Edge’ of the information network and take advantage of fast broadband services to remove the latency in service provision. The goal of Edge data centres is fast content delivery and data processing.

The design and build of a server room is arranged to provide a secure environment in which to run IT servers, storage and network devices.

• Critical power: is therefore one of the most important systems within a server room to ensure that there is a continuous source of electricity whether the mains power supply is available or not and to protect the IT loads from power outages. Most server rooms will have a centralised or decentralised power protection plan using uninterruptible power supplies, battery packs and a standby power generator arrangement.
• Cooling: IT servers produce a large amount of heat which can become concentrated within a server racks. Within a server room the racks may be arranged into hot and cold aisles, with air conditioning and cooling systems providing cool and humidity controlled air to the front of the server racks. Warm air is exhausted through the rear of the server racks and drawn back to the cooling system. The cool air may be delivered by wall mounted air conditioners, in-row or under-floor computer room air conditions (CRACSs). Without sufficient cooling a server rack housing 5-10kW of IT load could overheat within 15minutes of a loss of cooling and present a fire risk
• Fire Suppression Systems: deliver a fire suppression solution into the server racks or server room space when discharged. The fire suppression agent is chosen to reduce the amount of oxygen within the room to less than 16% (the level below which combustion cannot be maintained.
• Environmental Monitoring: temperature and humidity levels should be monitored in a server room environment to ensure the climate is managed. Sudden changes can indicate a problem with the air conditioning/cooling system which can lead to a downtime and equipment shutdown or a present a fire risk. Other environmental monitored characteristics can include water leakage and smoke detection. An environmental monitoring system will consist of a base unit and sensors and provide alarm alerts when the measured data points fall outside of set thresholds. Alarms can be set to trigger the sending of alert emails, SMS text messages and phone calls, with environmental monitoring devices being access over a HTTPS/HTTP cloud monitoring portals, or reporting via SNMP to data centre infrastructure monitoring (DCIM) packages
• Remote Reboot: KVM switches are used to provide manage and control servers and IT networking devices, and can allow for remote reboots or the powering down of non-essential servers.
• Security: the equipment within a server room are high value items and the data they are processing and services they provide can be mission critical. Doorways are generally controlled via the building’s access control system. This can extend to the server cabinets which will can be installed with access controlled door handles, requiring an authorised MIFARE type card, biometric finger-print and/or keypad pin to gain entry. CCTV cameras may also be deployed to cover doorways, specific server racks and the room itself.

Levels of redundancy may be built into the critical systems to ensure service availability, even during maintenance.

A server room provides a space within a building in which to securely house servers, data storage and IT networking switches and routers. The room provides a temperature and humidity-controlled environment, backup power and environmental monitoring systems to ensure availability of the organisation’s computing functions, protected from mains power outages and other threats. Server rooms are arranged to house the IT equipment in server racks, and these may be arranged into hot and cold aisles on a raised access floor. The under-floor areas provide space for power and data cabling (in place of overhead trays) and cooling air flow. The server room may be under access control, to provide security protection, alongside CCTV cameras.