How to choose the best pre-engineered cleanroom for your data center

If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed in our digital world of today, it’s the robust demand for servers and data centers, especially since the beginning of the generative AI era. 

The leap has been in terms of not only quantity but also quality. Modern servers have made tremendous leaps in sophistication over the years. Today, they are more compact and powerful than they have ever been before. 

But even with all the good they bring, they present some inevitable challenges, the most critical of which is the heat they generate. The hotter servers get, the more sophisticated cooling systems they need, the greater the need for sustainable, energy-efficient systems. Essentially, they must be housed in temperature-controlled environments to ensure their efficient operation. 

That’s not all. Servers also have sensitive components that must be protected from dust and other contaminants. As such, anyone investing in a data center is essentially investing in a cleanroom – a controlled environment that must be equipped with systems for filtration, air conditioning, humidification, water leak detection, remote system monitoring, and beyond. 

Setting up a stick-built cleanroom for your data center is a massive undertaking in terms of time, costs, labour, regulation, and more. So it’s unsurprising that more and more industry players are opting for pre-engineered or modular cleanrooms for data centers. 

While pre-engineered cleanrooms offer many advantages over stick-built ones, not all pre-engineered cleanrooms are the same. The best pre-engineered cleanroom for data centers has many characteristics that set it apart from other modular cleanrooms. The best pre-engineered cleanroom for data centers takes into consideration industry best practices, regulatory requirements, individual business requirements, the local context, and many other factors. 

In this set of blog posts, we’re going to discuss the features that the best pre-engineered cleanrooms for data centers have in common. From required ISO classifications and best practices to the cost of pre-engineered cleanrooms for data centers, we’ll cover it all.

 

What the best pre-engineered cleanrooms for data centers account for: Causes of data center contamination 

Whether you use stick-built or modular cleanrooms for your data centers, there are some external and internal contaminants that you have to protect your equipment from.

External contaminants include airborne pollutants like particulate matter, pollen, construction dust, and even sea salt. When personnel or visitors enter the facility, they may also contaminate the space with skin particles, shedding hair, and fibres or lint from clothing.

In the internal environment of the data center cleanroom, emissions from floor tiles, furniture, packaging material, and corrosive gases emitted during processes also pose a threat to the safety and longevity of the equipment.

Off-site fabrication, combined with the absence of bricks and cement used in traditional construction, means that modular cleanrooms for data centers don’t present all the contamination threats that stick-built cleanrooms have. Contamination from concrete dust (which often comprises calcium, silica, and other corrosive and abrasive by-products) is minimised in modular cleanrooms.

Nonetheless, some other contaminants pose threats even for pre-engineered data centers. The best pre-engineered cleanroom for data centers will protect the equipment inside from ferrous metal particles, corrosive gases, zinc and tin whiskers, chlorides, and electrostatic dust.

Ferrous metal particles are released by numerous components of the cleanroom itself, including new floor tiles, worn-out parts in HVAC units, tape drives, printers, conduit pipes, and other mechanical components. The ferrous particles must be eliminated because the metallic nature of these contaminants can cause electrical damage to circuit boards.

Gases like hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, chlorine, and the like must also be eliminated from the cleanroom because they cause silver and copper to corrode. This means that the presence of these contaminants can damage wiring and delicate metallic parts in circuit boards and chips.

Zinc and tin whiskers are the small metal filaments that escape from electroplated steel floor plates, ceiling bars, and other metal components used in the construction of modular cleanrooms for data centers. As efficient conductors of electricity, they present similar threats as other metallic components.

Chlorides and other salts in the air pose the threat of corroding metals, especially in coastal areas. Meanwhile, dust and lint from any surface, be it paper, cardboard or clothing, can become static-charged. This electrostatic dust can interfere with the working of servers, causing erroneous commands, resets, data losses, and other issues.

As you embark on your expedition of finding the best pre-engineered cleanroom for your data centers, make sure that anyone you choose is designed to prevent contamination with the above gases and particles. If you don’t have well-designed modular cleanrooms for your data centers, you run the risk of various problems. Think equipment failure, a lack of power efficiency, head crashes, and contact intermittence, none of which you want if you want to run an efficient, successful data center.

 

Best practices for the best pre-engineered cleanroom for data centers 

As a data center operator, there are some best practices you can adopt to ensure that your modular cleanroom operates at its highest possible efficiency.

To maintain the optimal environment for your equipment, you must monitor humidity levels and atmospheric corrosion. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends that you monitor copper and silver reactivity, i.e. corrosion, limiting it to 300 Å or less. You must restrict foot traffic and use sticky mats. Maintenance of your modular cleanroom for your data center also involves using chemical filtration systems and replacing dust filters regularly.

Additionally, you must conduct annual contamination assessments and carry out deep cleaning to ensure that you continue to maintain required standards. You can contract third parties for both testing and cleaning; we recommend employing a company or service that is familiar with the standards required by your cleanroom.

But adopting these best practices isn’t enough. Before you even have a modular cleanroom for your data center up and running, you have to make the important decision of choosing which cleanroom type and which cleanroom manufacturer you want to work with. You have to think about design, engineering and ISO classifications as well as plan for expansion, redundancy, maintenance, and longevity.

Setting up the best pre-engineered cleanroom for data centers is a complex multi-step process that requires that you partner up with the right engineering company. In part 2 of this blog post, we’re going to explore what makes a successful cleanroom project in the IT industry, which ISO standards you need to meet, the specifications you need to assess, and the type of engineering team you should partner with.