ASHRAE STANDARDS AND PRACTICES FOR DATA CENTERS

Many reputable organizations and institutions publish a variety of codes, standards, guidelines, and best practice documents dedicated to improving the performance, reliability, energy efficiency, and economics of data centers. ASHRAE is actually international and publishes the most comprehensive range of information available for the heating, ventilation, and air‐conditioning industry. For the first time, Thermal Guidelines gave the industry a bona fide range of environmental temperature and humidity conditions for data center computing hardware. The other major change in Thermal Guidelines was the recommendation to control data center moisture content on dew point rather than on relative humidity, which had been the norm for decades. The concern with humidity has always been one of preventing static discharge, which everyone has experienced on cold winter days when the air is very dry. ASHRAE/ANSI Standard 90.4 is a performance‐based standard. ASHRAE is a significant source of information for the data center industry.