Why ASHRAE is concerned about edge data centers

There are few organizations that have had as big an impact on data center design as ASHRAE — and specifically, their Technical Committee (TC) 9.9. ASHRAE’s 2004 publication Thermal guidelines for Data Processing Environments described the optimal environmental operating conditions for the electronics in a data center, and in doing so, effectively established some of the key design goals that have been followed by almost every data center builder and operator for the past 15 years.

In October 2020, ASHRAE published what it describes as a “groundbreaking” Technical Bulletin — this time looking specifically at edge data centers. The Bulletin is a lighter, shorter document than most previous TC9.9 publications, and it does not signal any changes in the thermal operating guidelines that remain so important. Nor does it reveal any significant new findings — even though TC9.9 members do have access to a lot of data and tests conducted by equipment manufacturers.