Data Centre Cleaning Standard (5 Micron Clean)

A Standard For Cleanliness ISO 14664-1

Less than optimally clean hardware can severely impact data center performance. Submicroscopic particulates can interfere with your valuable equipment’s electronics, leading to hard-to-troubleshoot problems and even data loss.

Dissipating heat is essential to data center operations, which means maintaining a steady airflow through the data center. But this constant airflow can bring with it dust, dirt, and other types of particulates that find their way into your equipment’s delicate electronic innards. No matter how well your filtering systems work, every now and then it is necessary for data centre cleaning or computer room cleaning to be done.

Believe it or not, there is a standard for data centre cleaning, based on cleanroom and critical enviroment standards,. The ISO 14644 series of standards (14644-1 to 14644-9) are a series of documents that establish various classifications for cleanliness as well as methods for testing compliance, test methods, design/constructions/start up considerations, and others.

The yardstick for measuring cleanliness is the amount of microscopic particles found per cubic metre of air. These particles range in size from 5μm (micrometer: a millionth of a metre) in diameter down to 0.5μm in diameter. Obviously, the larger the amount of large particles in an environment, the visibly dirtier the environment is. On the other hand, a small amount of very small particles means an extremely clean environment.

The ISO 14644-1 standard sets up ISO classes from 1 through 9; ISO Class 1, for example, allows only Ten particles at 0.1μm and two at 0.2μm per cubic metre's of air. Class 1 is the ultimate in cleanliness, a tremendously stringent standard that only highly controlled environments, such as clean rooms in microprocessor fabrication or drug manufacture, can achieve.

Most data centres need to be kept clean, so they meet ISO Class 8 standards. Class 8 allows 3.52 million 0.5μm particles per cubic metre. Class 8 is often refered to as a 5 Micron Clean or Clinical Clean. Indeed the following Cisco, Sun and EMC now all state what the acceptable levels of contamination are for their equipment. All three hardware vendors now state that their equipment must be kept in a data centre which has been decontaminated to a sufficient level on the ISO 14644-1 Clean Room and Critical environment scale, this is Class 8 or better. The latest to do this is EMC, who in their most recent Symmetrix Planning Guide which, states their equipment must be placed in a data centre at Class 8 or better on the ISO scale.

IT Cleaning specification is ITC DC Class 8 all accessible surfaces to be dust free (5 Micron Clean). This is ISO 14664 Class 8 for air particulate plus all accessible surfaces free from dust.

Airborne Particulate Monitoring/Survey to ISO14664-3