Computer servers are expensive, delicate and need constant oversight to ensure maximum up time. When a workplace server goes down, productivity can be lost causing companies tens of thousands of dollars per hour in lost wages. A climate-controlled server room is essential, providing temperature-regulated and clean air for your critical systems.

Climate Regulation

A server room that is climate-controlled ensures a constant temperature morning, noon, night, weekends and on holidays. Air can be recirculated and piped in to keep temperatures even no matter the outside conditions. Recirculated air is clean air too, with harmful impurities removed throughout the circulation process. Such air is ideal for computer and humans alike.

Life Span Extension

Modern computer systems are much more tolerant to extremes in temperatures than previous generation models. Nonetheless with a temperature regulated room, your equipment can last for its full intended life span. Your computers may still run fine in a minimally controlled room, but your equipment such as hard disks can fail quicker in rooms that are dusty and warm.

Scheduled Maintenance

Even with a climate-controlled room, businesses cannot ignore equipment maintenance cycles. Your I.T. team will monitor logs and equipment throughout the day, but the HVAC system itself needs to be inspected and maintained on a scheduled basis. Much of the day to day oversight can be handled by your team, but maintenance crew familiar with the workings of your HVAC system will still need to be relied upon to perform occasional inspections. This crew should also be available after hours when automatic notifications are sent by the server room to your smart phone that a problem is in the offing.

Room Specifications

The set up a server room can be costly for small businesses, but using an existing office as the computer room can be fine as long as it is temperature controlled, frequently checked and has limited access. Such rooms should offer excellent ventilation, be windowless, offers wall-secured storage, have an ample number of dedicated power outlets, runs on its own electrical circuit, is not located near other power line or transformers and has sufficient communication lines. You will still need a raised floor to ensure adequate air circulation.

Remote Hosting

For some businesses, hosting servers is a huge cost and a headache that is best left in the care of the professionals. If your enterprise can afford it, then shop for a company that provides server hosting. The advantage here is that your services are contracted out to a company that can maintain your servers so that you do not have to. This option may seem expensive, but it can be a very efficient one too. For instance, you do not need your own personnel on hand to monitor the system. Your host does that for you. Your workers are then freed to handle other tasks or you can simply cut back on staff saving your company money.

Disaster Recovery

Your business is courting disaster if a disaster recovery plan is not in place. Whether your servers are in-house or farmed out, there are some things to consider as formulate your plans.

First, your entire company’s data is residing on your servers. Thus, it needs to be backed up automatically and that information stored remotely. One way to do this is to store your information in the cloud, allowing for immediate recovery of your data if your equipment is damaged. Second, when a failure does take place, you need to be immediately notified of the problem. If you’re out of town, you’ll need to send someone to your place of business to initiate recovery. Otherwise, a vendor can handle this for you. Consider that you’ll need to have your data restored, reinstalled and your failed data backups completed.

Derek Newman writes from ITWatchDogs, which offers environmental and temperature monitor tools that monitor power, humidity, light, airflow and much more. Install these into your server room, data center, cold storage, research lab or other mission critical facilities to prevent equipment failure or downtime.