ASHRAE TC 9.9 Technical Bulletin

This ASHRAE TC 9.9 Technical Bulletin highlights the environmental and reliability challenges of edge data centres and the design and maintenance challenges of these data centres that are surrounded by semi-controlled or even uncontrolled external environments.

This technical bulletin has been written to highlight the environmental and reliability challenges of small edge data centers.

Examples of small data centers include:

• Modular data centers fabricated from steel shipping containers
• Prefabricated edge pods
• Small stand-alone brick-and-mortar data centers
• Phone-booth-sized enclosures that hold a single rack
• Very small enclosures that hold only one or two servers

These small data centers generally include a preassembled and pretested enclosure all of the compute, storage, networking, power, cooling, security, and management.