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Data Center Woes: Reliability Issues Plague RoHS-Compliant Electronics

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Concerns about electronic equipment reliability surfaced even before the European Union and China versions of RoHS regulations went into effect in 2006. There are now more than a dozen countries with some type of lead-free manufacturing regulations in place that affect everything from consumer electronics to industrial process and control systems.

The continuing reduction in circuit board feature sizes and the miniaturization of components necessary to improve hardware performance makes electronic hardware more prone to attack by corrosive contaminants.  Manufacturers are in a constant struggle to maintain the reliability of their equipment and thus the need to control airborne contaminants in the data center and to specify the acceptable limits is now critical to the continued reliable operation of datacom and IT equipment.

Increases in the rate of corrosion-related hardware failures in data centers, highlighted by the number of recent publications on the subject, has led to new specifications for the data center environment that require the monitoring and control of gaseous (and particulate) contamination.  These additional environmental measures are especially important for data centers located in urban centers, near industries and/or other sources that could produce corrosive airborne contaminants.

It is incumbent on the data center managers to do their part in maintaining hardware reliability by monitoring and controlling contamination in their data centers.  The gaseous contamination should be within the modified ANSI/ISA 71.04-1985 severity level of G1.  For data centers with higher gaseous contamination levels, gas-phase air filtration of the ventilation air and the air inside the data center is recommended.

Data centers in many urban locations have reported failures of servers and hard disk drives due to sulfur corrosion. Desktop and laptop computers, servers, data communications (datacom) equipment and other information technology (IT) equipment are at risk due to RoHS.

This paper will discuss ongoing reliability issues related to RoHS-compliant electronic equipment in data centers. Air quality monitoring and failure analysis data will be presented from several different locations illustrating the fact that corrosive environments exist in locations that would otherwise be considered benign if not for the changes mandated by RoHS legislation.

Speaker: Chris Muller

Job title: Technical Director and Global Mission Critical Technology Manage

Chris Muller is the Technical Director and Global Mission Critical Technology Manager at Purafil, Inc. (Doraville, Georgia USA) and is responsible for Purafils data center business development program as well as for technical support services and various research and development functions. Prior to joining Purafil, he worked in the chemical process and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries in plant management and quality assurance/quality control.

He has written and spoken extensively on the subject of environmental air quality, the application and use of gas-phase air filtration, corrosion control and monitoring, electronic equipment reliability, and RoHS and counts over 120 articles and peer-reviewed papers, more than 100 seminars, and 7 handbooks to his credit.

He is one of only a handful of ASHRAE members named as a Distinguished Lecturer and has received their Distinguished Service Award. He is a corresponding member for Technical Committee 9.9 Mission Critical Facilities, Technology Spaces and edited their handbook on Particulate and Gaseous Contamination in Datacom Environments.

Watch this session in the IT and Management Theatre on March 01 2012 at 2:30 pm