in the United States and indeed around the world we have many different data centers that are operating 24 hours a day 7 days a week it is estimated that approximately 2% of all us power consumption is used by these data centers much of the power we use in these data centers is to manage the environment where all of this equipment resides this allows us to manage the humidity the temperature and other environmental controls managing humidity in a data center can be a bit of a challenge if you have a high humidity then you've got condensation and having any type of water in a data center is never a good idea if your humidity is too low you could have excessive static discharge which is also potentially harmful to the equipment many industry guidelines put the ideal humidity levels somewhere around 40 to 60% this is high enough to prevent any type of static discharge but low enough to prevent any type of condens ation this can vary a bit depending on the geography but these humidity levels tend to be the average that you'll find in most data centers a lot of this power also goes to keeping the data center cool as this equipment is running it's generating heat and all of that heat needs to be cooled down there is an optimal temperature range and many data centers are trying to keep the temperature somewhere around 64 to 81° F the cooling equipment in our data centers is constantly working to keep the temperature at that range but of course there are external influences that can affect the temperature inside the building for example the outdoor temperature may increase or decrease and that may add additional load to the cooling systems you might also find that as your system load increases and you're creating more heat from the systems inside of the data center that we will need to add additional cooling most data centers will have a well-engineered heating ventilation and air conditioning system this is an H HV vac this HVAC system is designed to maintain a particular humidity and temperature level most of these HVAC systems have sensors that are located throughout the data center and they're working to make sure that the same temperature and humidity is the same across the entire data center another important concern for data centers is what you do if there is a fire data centers contain a large amount of electrical equipment that are in a very large area so we need to be sure that we have some way to press any type of fire normally we would use water to be able to control a fire but in an environment such as a data center when you have this much electrical equipment you'll want to use other means for fire suppression if you were to look into the back of the data center there's probably a tank that contains some type of inert gas or chemical agent that is designed to either suppress the fire or remove any type of oxygen from the air if somebody pulls the fire alarm all of those chemicals are dispersed throughout the entire data to Center and although this may cause damage to the equipment it will prevent a fire from spreading you'll often see these fire suppression systems integrated with the existing HVAC this means that if a fire is detected the HVAC system will shut down and prevent any type of oxygen from feeding that fire