Common risk factors affecting your comms rooms

Imagine moving into your new home only to find that the place is dusty, full of rubbish, and quite unhealthy. You could live in it, but it wouldn’t be a place that you would want to show off to your guests nor family members, would you? This illustration is similar to what I have found in a lot of comms rooms as they are often cluttered, dirty, and full of dust. 

A communications room, also known as "comms room", is ideally a clean and secure, purpose-built room with adequate space, power, and cooling, specifically designed to host your valuable IT equipment. It is important that these rooms are maintained in a clean and tidy state. 

In this article, I will highlight a few common risk factors and elaborate on how to reduce them, so that you can minimise your risks to operational outages and are able to extend your hardware’s lifetime. 

1. Dust 

Dust can damage your IT equipment such as incurred in this article. Electronic devices generate heat and requires cooling to ensure its components do not overheat and eventually shut down. The powerful fans inside these devices achieve this task by absorbing the air from the room. When the air is contaminated with dust particles, these substances can be absorbed by the machine and can either damage your equipment or cause overheating over time. 

The consequences of this risk include unplanned outages or reduced lifespan of your IT equipment. Ultimately, either of these impacts can result in reputational damage, increased maintenance costs, or out of cycle procurement in order to replace damaged assets. 

There are several ways to minimise this risk. One easy solution is to avoid storing card boxes or paper material in the comms rooms as they generate fine particles over time. In fact, many purpose-built data centres do not allow card boxes being carried into their data halls during a relocation for this specific reason. Instead, devices must be unpacked within the loading dock or staging area before being allowed to be installed in data halls.  

Another way to minimise this risk is to clean your room on a regular basis either while it is still operational, or for a safer approach, during a planned outage window. Alternatively, hire a specialist IT room cleaner who has the expertise and appropriate cleaning gear to maintain your operational excellence.  

2. Littering 

Similar to dust, littering is not uncommon to be found within comms rooms. I've seen various items left behind during inspections from water bottles and used coffee cups, to left over plastics, cable cuttings, and screws. Different litter encompass different risks although the impacts are similar i.e. unplanned outages or increased costs.  

Liquid is an electric hazard when spilt, so this is more than just a risk to your devices, but an occupational health and safety (OH&S) issue as well. This risk can simply be eliminated by prohibiting people to eat or drink in the comms room. Similarly, a “no food no drinks” policy is strictly applied as well in well-maintained data centres. 

Left over ferrous litter such as stranded wire cuttings can also be absorbed into equipment and damage internal components as it passes through them at high speed, which may void replacement warranty. Plastic wraps can obstruct air intake into fan grills which inhibits effective cooling. Screws on the floor, apart from an OH&S issue, can also be accidentally kicked into devices that are installed at lower rack units, resulting in damages. This risk can be reduced by mandating technicians to clean up after each job (or each day) and/or by regularly hiring a specialist IT room cleaners to tackle both litter and dust at the same time. 

3. Room repurpose 

Either systematically or sporadically, sometimes purpose-built comms rooms are unintentionally converted into storage rooms. It may start innocently by staff storing newly purchased laptops inside these rooms for safekeeping, continued by other personnel storing away unused IT hardware, and finally morphed into more people putting items away such as tools, snacks, drinks, and even Christmas decorations into this room with the aim of keeping their main office looking clean and tidy. This in turn is another contributor to the above-mentioned risks regarding dust and litter. 

Cluttered comms rooms may also prevent access to technicians from reaching and opening IT racks (from the front, back, or sometimes sides). This hindrance may result in delayed works or multiple revisits required, which increases the time and costs required to perform the job. To mitigate this risk, you can provide an awareness program educating staff regarding the purpose of your comms room and highlight items that do not belong there. Together with conducting regular checks and clean-ups, warning signs can also be introduced to remind people to avoid using the comms room as a storage area. If you do have to store IT related equipment e.g. patch cables or power cables in the room, store them in plastic tubs (instead of cardboard boxes to avoid generating dust particles) or in suitable cabinets. 

I hope you find this article useful and have obtained some insights to maintain your comms room neat and tidy. If you have any tips yourself, please don’t be shy and comment below!