Data Center

Why Humidify A Data Center?

Downtime and outages can cause decreased productivity, a damaged reputation, and lost revenue for data centers. On a daily basis data centers face insurmountable amounts of risk, environment conditions being one of them. Air circulation with too little humidity results in dry air, elevating the risk of electrostatic discharge (ESD). While too much humidity will cause condensation to form, leading to damage, corrosion and eventually equipment failure of motherboards, hard drives and in connecting sockets. Whether too little humidity or too much, both can lead to unexpected downtime resulting in lost revenue and upset clients.

To prolong the life expectancy of equipment by preventing ESD and corrosion due to excessive condensation, ASHRAE recommends maintaining a Relative Humidity (rH) range of 40 to 60 percent.1 DriSteem humidification systems are an essential part of maintaining an accurate relative humidity level within a data center which is critical to lowering the risk of outages, reducing energy costs, and mitigating environmental risks.

Avoid disruption of critical processes and costly damage to valuable equipment by controlling the environment condition with relative humidity.

Issues Caused By Low Or Fluctuating Relative Humidity

Impact to reputation

Protecting the reputation of a data center in today’s high demand world is detrimental to its longevity. Extended downtime negatively impacts one’s reputation resulting in unsatisfied customers. Maintaining a consistent environment with relative humidity lowers the risk of system failure.


Damage to equipment

For data centers using rack enclosures, monitoring humidity levels within the top 1/3 of a rack enclosure is minimally acceptable. It is most likely that equipment air intake will experience damage from low humidity conditions at this elevation.4 The cost of integrating an efficient and effective humidifier into a data center’s existing HVAC system is minimal in comparison to the potential damage of an uncontrolled environment.


Lost revenue

A survey by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) found a minimum uptime of 99.99% is required by 85% of businesses and their IT leaders. This equates to only 52 minutes annually of unplanned downtime of mission critical systems and applications. 2 A survey conducted by Ponemon Institute found the overall average cost of data center outage is $740,357. This is a 38% increase in average cost since 2010.3

DriSteem makes it easy to design a humidification system that is just right for your application. These easy to use calculators and selection tools will help you get there quickly and easily.

DriCalc

makes it easy to specify and select DriSteem equipment. You can access your projects online anywhere, any time. You can go step-by-step through the sizing and selection process, or enter items in a nonlinear order.

Register for DriCalc today

LoadCalc

allows you to make a quick calculation of the humidification load for your application.

LoadCalc Sign up

EnergyCalc

shows the energy cost comparison of using electricity vs gas. If you are in Europe, please use our Energy Calculator for Europe. Steam valve and strainer calculator:

Click to download