How does a data center withstand being struck by lightning, an excavator, or a pneumatic hammer?

Imagine that you are travelling to a foreign country with your family and arrive at your hotel. However, the roof leaks, breakfast is not served, and the rooms have not been cleaned at your accommodation establishment. Instead of spending time pleasantly, you are completely stressed. When you ask your travel agent, it turns out that the quality of this property was completely unverified. Instead, they had hoped for the best.

Obviously, you would not be satisfied with this answer and would never wish to experience it. Exactly the same goes for a data center.

Just as accommodation establishments are essential for spending a pleasant holiday, we need data centers to quickly and reliably deliver any and all e-services to the consumer. Obviously, you wish that someone has been convinced of the quality and reliability of the data center before you.

So, who will test it for you?

In short, testing is the duty and responsibility of the data center itself. The golden rule is that if a device or system is untested (and especially untested with a load), then it is also not worth assuming that it will work as expected. This is especially true in the case of backup systems. If your hotel in a southern country promises an air-conditioned room but has never turned on this air conditioner, then it is quite likely that you will be sweating.

‘Once the tests have been thoroughly conducted, the reliability of the data center and, along with it, the equipment and services of customers will increase. As a data center is a complex ecosystem, both likely and highly unlikely threat/risk scenarios are played out. While lightning strikes, as was the case with a Microsoft data center, are difficult to prevent, there are a number of other threats and risks that can be prevented. We are doing everything we can to be prepared for every incident,’ explained Thomas Kell from Greenergy Data Centers, who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the data center. In addition to increasing reliability, testing helps to optimise the day-to-day operation of data center infrastructure, which also means lower costs.

Ruthless methods

The most rigorous testing involves shutting down a piece of critical equipment in the centre to determine how backup equipment takes over its tasks and to make sure that the entire data center functions in the way as it did before the piece of equipment was shut off. The most extensive tests even go so far as to shut off the main electrical power supply of the data center and allow backup systems to be activated. This is the only way to know if data center customers can sleep peacefully at night.

An exhaustive picture of the reliability of the data center can be obtained only with fifth level testing, as only then will it become clear whether each component will function as intended under heavy load. ‘We have also conducted the highest level of testing in the safest data center in the Baltics, and at the time, it took several days to play through different scenarios with different loads. We went through hypothetical situations, for example, where someone unearths the center’s 110 kV electrical connection, negligently drills through a communication network in a building, or terminates the operation of a cooling module due to a device failure,’ said Kell, citing examples, ‘in no case was the work of the data center in Greenergy Data Centers interrupted, as backup systems were used, just as planned.’ Of course, testing does not stop there and we will continue to check the reliability of the complex on an ongoing basis in the future.

Rigorous tests are also a prerequisite for obtaining the highest international certificates. For example, the largest data center in the Baltics is the first in this region to soon comply with the EN50600 standard, which is the highest certification given to data centers and directly reflects the reliability and smooth operation of the complex.

Now, to return to the question posed in the title, there are also measures in place to prevent damage from lightning, with a top-class data center definitely being able to meet any other challenges.