Data Center Floor Loading Design for Data Centers
| Floor Loading Design for Data Centers |
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The floor of a data center is an important parameter of the overall design. Basically there are two types of floors used in data centers namely raised flooring as well as solid flooring. Each of these have their own set of advantages and drawbacks and careful consideration is required on the part of a design engineer to find out which one is better suited for a particular requirement. From the perspective of load requirements, the solid type of floor certainly offers better load carrying capacity than their raised counterparts. This is an important observation since with the increasing technological developments, the data center equipments are getting denser by the day, meaning thereby that they are putting increasing pressure on the floors, and this needs to be taken into consideration. For example a typical equipment rack could easily weight nearly a thousand kilos. It may not be a big problem if this were a fixed weight but many times it may be required to relocate these equipment racks within the data center. This certainly calls for a very strong floor design, especially if it is of the raised floor type. In the absence of proper reinforcements in such a case, it may lead to bending and buckling of the floors with a potential to damage the costly equipment which might be worth millions of dollars in cost, not to mention the indirect cost of downtime due to such a damage which might be several times more than this. Care must be taken to have a proper floor design for the same purpose and it should be ensured that in case of a raised floor, the tiles which are being used for reinforcement are removed very carefully while performing any maintenance activities such as changing of cables and so forth. If due care and vigilance is not exercised in this regard, this might lead to a collapse of the entire room and the consequences of this need not be reiterated. Of course it must also be kept in mind that floor loading is just a single parameter and there are several other parameters which cannot be studied independently but in connection with each other. For example a data center needs to be secure from the effects of a reasonable magnitude of earthquake and so forth. the design considerations of these will also be kept in mind by the data center design engineer and requires careful calculation of the forces and so on. The floor loading design requires specials structural certification on the part of the engineer in order to ensure the long term safety of the data center. Infact such loading requirements are not only unique to data centers but can be applied to several different types of organisations like say for example libraries, which might hold heavy books in shelves which are though different from servers but the overall layout is quite similar to that of a data center. As described towards the beginning of this article, loads which are heavy yet fixed are not that much of a problem and it is relatively easier to computer forces for them in order to study the design considerations. These loads are known as dead loads, obviously because of their incapacity to move around like live persons. Intuitively it can be imagined that loads which are not dead are live, and hence loads which can be moved around are referred to by the same name, i.e. live loads. This movement of live loads is what adds complexity to load calculations and therefore the calculations of stress and strains as a result of these loads is much more than simply knowing the overall weight and the pressure that they exert at a fixed point. Obviously it is much beyond the scope of this article to study the theoretical as well as the practical aspects of such calculations and the mathematics behind it, but this brief reference should have given a hint to the reader about the subject matter in questions. It is upto the structural design engineer to study and suggest whether tiles, steel plates or beams should be used for reinforcement depending on the particular situation and the exact floor plans etc for the specific data center in question. Another point worth noting regarding this discussion is the associated costs of a data center as that is one of the primary worries of any company. The cost is subdivided into five subheads out of which CSA is an important part and it stands for Civil, Structural and Architectural costs. Obviously CSA has to do a lot with floor loading design and is affected by the variation in the density of the data center. If you are not aware of term, high density refers to data centers with racks of 14kW or above with a work cell of about 16-20 square feet. A term closely associated to this is the layout efficiency which stands for the racks per thousand square feet of the data center. This parameter is not dependent on the size of the racks unlike another parameter which was defined earlier known as the Rack Penetration Factor, and the normal values of layout efficiency for typical data centers varies between 20 and 30, higher value signifying a better arrangement. In this article we learnt a lot of things about floor loading design for data centers and also realized the interconnection between various values and parameters in this context. It must be always kept in mind that floor loading design is of critical importance for any data center in the long run as neglecting or ignoring this factor could lead to a potential problem in the long run. Proper floor reinforcement must be done, not to mention that high density data centers offer better cost of ownership for the data center company. These requirements might seem bit contradictory but an experienced engineer would just maintain the proper balance between load and efficiency. |
