After six weeks of sunshine and high temperatures, I reflected on how well the cooling installations in our data centers were performing and the fact that so far we hadn’t encountered any problem this summer. The very next day, however, one of our air conditioning units indicated it suffered badly under the extreme conditions of the persisting heat. Fortunately, we designed our systems to be fully redundant, and our team, which was on the scene immediately, kept their cool and did an excellent job in resolving the incident.

In the past, things were different. When we first opened our data center, over 15 years ago, we faced problems as soon as the weather turned hot. This was often the result of inadequate maintenance, such as when the cooling generators on the roof became clogged up with pollen. Since that incident, we have carried out additional maintenance work every spring to remove the pollen. On very hot days we had to contend with failing systems, and this was particularly problematic when a second site was affected too. While this was very frustrating, it taught us that we needed to address the issue of cooling differently.

Practice makes perfect, so when we made new investments we took into account the fact that roofs become particularly hot in the summer, for example - thus generating more heat inside of the data centers. Our new data centers were therefore designed with extra large cooling generators on their roofs to ensure they can deal with high temperatures.

Given the heatwave currently hitting our country – the second already this summer –, we are very glad that we took those decisions. We will have to take even higher temperatures into consideration if global warming continues. If climate change creates additional problems in the future, the design of data centers will have to be fully adapted to cope with that phenomenon.

In Uptime Institute's annual global data center survey (2018) of almost 900 data center operators and IT practitioners, 46% of respondents said that their organizations were not addressing potential climate change disruption to their data centers. The advice is to conduct disaster and emergency planning in the context of a broader emergency and business continuity plan. At LCL, we take the Tier design criteria into account in order to increase operational efficiency and improve the reliability of our business critical infrastructure. We also test our backup systems once a month by simulating a power outage. Floods may not occur often in Belgium, but (heat) thunderstorms do take place once in a while… We at LCL, are prepared for the rapidly changing climate conditions.

Laurens van Reijen