As the UK bakes, one industry remains cool and collected.
Web hosting company Fasthosts manages customer websites and apps from a Tier IV data centre in Worcester, where thousands of servers run flat out 24/7.
Maintaining a 99.999 per cent uptime means keeping servers cool is a necessity, with a single rack of servers generating more heat than a household oven.
With more people working from home, Fasthosts has shared tips from the data centre to use at your desk, whether that’s in the office or the spare room.
Stop hot and cold air mixing. Data centres work on the principle of cold aisle containment, keeping cold supply air and hot exhaust air strictly apart so they don’t cancel each other out. Shut doors to rooms being cooled, block gaps and don’t run a fan in a space where warm air is pouring straight back in.
Cool the person not the room. A data centre aims cold air at specific machines rather than chilling the whole building. A fan pointed at you cools you far more efficiently than trying to drop the temperature of a whole room.
Use the cool air while it’s free. Open up at night and early morning when it’s cooler, then shut everything up and close the blinds before the day heats up. Data centres use outside air instead of power-consuming chillers when the weather allows.
Block the heat before it gets in. A lot of data centre design is about stopping unwanted heat in the first place. Close blinds and curtains on the sunny side, especially south-facing windows.
Switch off what you’re not using. Every running machine in a data centre is a heat source, so idle kit gets managed carefully. Computers, monitors, chargers, and old-style bulbs all dump heat into the room.
Give the air somewhere to go. Data centres obsess over how air moves, not just how cold it is. A cross-breeze, with windows open on opposite sides of a space, shifts far more heat than one fan working hard in still air.
Fasthosts also point out that their Worcester data centre is one of the UK’s most eco-friendly, with a solar-panelled roof generating around 10 per cent of the site’s energy needs.
The site operates on 100 per cent renewable electricity, with backup generators running on HVO biofuel instead of diesel.