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When running a data center, your primary concerns often involve keeping the computers cool and ensuring the company’s data stay organized and secure. Data center cleaning should also be a top priority on your list. A clean environment is integral to your server room’s functionality, and a professional cleaning team is essential to achieving that. In this guide, we’ll discuss why you should use a data center cleaning service and what you can expect from the experience.

Why Use a Data Center Cleaning Service?

Data center equipment can collect dust and debris like any other object — only it becomes more difficult to clean because of the machinery’s sensitive components. Dust and ferrous metal particles collect on circuit boards, but these can’t be cleaned off the same way you might with other surfaces. Improper or absent cleaning procedures can allow for additional debris accumulation, which can lead to equipment overheating and malfunction. A data center cleaning service is trained to handle these specialized concerns.

Ridding the air of dust and debris improves working conditions for your employees, boosting their health and overall morale. Taking the time to ensure your server room is clean shows you care about the company as a whole and want to provide a healthy environment for your workers. And with higher morale and fewer sick days, your employees’ productivity will rise, benefiting your bottom line.

There are many great reasons to use a data center cleaning service over a standard janitorial service. Here are just a few outlined below:

1. Protect Your Technology

Small amounts of particulate matter, such as electrostatic dust, can cause hard drive and tape failures. Even 250 volts of static electricity can result in data memory loss and circuitry damage. Electrostatic dust sticks to the surfaces of your equipment and acts as an insulator, preventing it from cooling down as necessary. Temperature monitoring for data center equipment is a delicate process — an increase of a few degrees could encourage overheating.

You may have stringent environmental monitoring practices in place, but overlooking something as simple as vacuuming away dirt and dust could undo that hard work. If you find your machinery often experiences unexplainable downtime or failures, an unclean environment might be why.

2. Prevent Contamination

Workers, technicians and cleaning teams can bring contamination into a data center if they step inside without the proper equipment — or if the center itself isn’t well-equipped to block outside contamination. Sticky mats, shoe covers and hairnets are a few ways for your in-house team to decrease contamination before the cleaning team ever arrives.

Some materials, like zinc whiskers, can be incredibly small or even microscopic to the human eye, meaning you’ll never visibly see all the contaminants within a room. These concentrated particles can cause fires and even explosions when close to heat sources. They don’t have to come solely from within your facility, either. Many data centers exist in areas with poor outdoor air quality, which can introduce pollutants like motor vehicle exhaust.

3. Extend Your Machinery’s Lifespan

When you hire excellent data center cleaning services, you’ll have fewer contaminants to worry about and, therefore, fewer equipment failures to manage. Your machinery will last longer when it’s properly maintained, meaning you’ll decrease the time and resources spent on costly repairs and replacements.

Downtime costs North American companies up to $700 billion a year. It’s a better tradeoff to deal with scheduled downtime for equipment cleaning rather than work around unexpected periods of downtime caused by damaged devices. DataSpan’s cleaning services take this to the next step — we do our jobs while your equipment is running to avoid downtime.

4. Avoid Expensive Mistakes

Janitorial services work well for many fields, but they aren’t adequately equipped to manage the demands that come with cleaning a data center. Data center cleaners undergo extensive and continuous training to stay on top of the latest developments in equipment cleaning techniques and best practices. DataSpan technicians are trained according to ISO 14644, ASHRAE TC9, World Health Organization, and the institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies to help test and identify sources of contaminates during our cleaning services in your data center, ISP, network, control room or other critical environments.

Ask these questions before employing anyone to perform data center cleaning for you:

• Have they received training that adheres to the ISO 14644 standard?
• Do they use the proper chemicals, such as antistatic cleaning solutions?
• Do they record particulate counts before and after the cleaning to ensure your data center is ISO compliant?
• Do they provide an Environmental report on your data center?