Hot or Cold; Humid or Dry; Dust or Salt; Prefabricated Data Centers Can Handle Harsh Environments
Tuesday February 2, 2016
In Part I of this blog series, I laid out the issues around the urgent need in the oil and gas industry to modernize IT infrastructures to maximize performance and optimize operational levels. I also outlined how prefabricated data centers offer a unique solution to meet the industry’s unique requirements.
Challenges include poor quality of existing infrastructure, small populations of professional expertise and some of the most inhospitable environments on earth. It’s these environments I’ll be highlighting in this post.
Oil and gas operations are often managed out of locations with extreme temperatures, on offshore platforms or at sites exposed to sand, dust or high concentrations of air pollutants. Prefabricated data centers make special allowances for these difficult conditions.
Environments with Sand & Dust
Power and IT prefabricated modules can be fitted with data center vestibules to protect critical data by reducing cross-contamination between external air and the data center.
An air lock entry is fitted with inner and outer doors that open in an alternating pattern so that only one set is open at any given time to prevent air infiltration into the IT space.
To insulate against smoke gases and prevent heat spread, the rest of the external structure not protected by a vestibule is typically reinforced with 60 to 120 millimeter (mm) insulated panels.
Air renovation and purification systems, customized with sand traps, can guarantee normal working conditions and sand trap customization should also be performed on condenser’s coils to avoid sand backlog.
Marine & Offshore
Marine environments present high concentrations of salt and chlorine, threatening erosion to the external structure and degradation of materials.
High-performance coatings for highly corrosive environments up to ISO 12944 C4 and C5 classification can be requested. You should also consider periodical on-site maintenance services to detect and remediate issues related to corrosion.
External condensers may also need to be treated with epoxy resins to prevent oxidation and/or corrosion of the inter...