Earthquake Resistance Is a Priority in Data Centers, the Archive of the Digital World
Press Bulletin / March 2023
The Kahramanmaraş Earthquake, which happened last month, affected many provinces and left an unforgettable trace in our country's history. We have once again seen that it is important that critical structures (such as hospitals, airports, and fire stations) that need to be used immediately after a disaster can continue their services as much as the houses where people live.
In today's world, where industrial heritage and industrial culture have developed, the safety and robustness of industrial structures are fundamental criteria. Data centers, which we define as critical facilities whose number is increasing steadily among the industrial structures that ensure the continuity of life, are the archives of the digital world. Data centers, supported by huge investments, are indispensable for ensuring sustainability in many critical areas such as technology, communication and finance in the world.
Data centers are at the forefront of industrial structures that contain sensitive dynamics due to the servers, backup systems, network layers, and air conditioning systems inside. Data centers, which must include extremely high security and robustness, differ from other buildings due to the importance of the equipment inside and the physical dynamics of the buildings. The earthquake resistance of data centers, whose project design principles and parameters differ significantly from other residential buildings, is one of the areas that require special expertise.
Mesut Küçük, Director of Data Centers at Serban, which builds the data centers of Turkey's leading GSM companies, said: "All buildings must be resistant to natural disasters and especially to earthquakes, which are most common in our country. Continuity and robustness are essential in building construction. The earthquake performance of buildings varies in parallel with their intended use.
For this purpose, each country has its disaster regulations and determines building importance coefficients. Data centers are also built with a high importance coefficient. They should be earthquake-resistant structures due to the human resources inside, the importance of the data they store and the sensitive structures of the devices inside. For this reason, data centers should have the design and material quality that can survive possible earthquakes undamaged on a solid foundation.'' and talked about the importance of earthquake resistance of data centers.
Küçük also made some recommendations on data center construction: "The resilience of data centers to natural disasters is a priority issue and requires great care and expertise, starting with the choice of project's location. Data centers are different from other structures of the same size, and the performance of the data center will increase via seismic isolators and shear columns. The building height class is also chosen more conservatively than it should be. Not only in earthquakes but also in all natural disasters and extraordinary situations, critical structures such as data centers should be designed at a level that will remain stable, continue to serve, and even in the most adverse situation, by experiencing ductile fractures, not brittle fractures, and can be reactivated with short revisions."
Mesut Küçük, Director of Data Centers at Serban, shared Serban's practices regarding the resilience of data centers: "We follow a strategic path in our data centers projects and carry out high-quality projects. We analyze the needs from the beginning to the end of the project and draw our roadmap in a way to dominate possible risks. Since we prioritize durability in our data centers projects, we select every colleague working in this field from experts and experienced people. The use of quality materials and advanced technology systems is an area where Serban makes a difference in all its works. We base our projects on safe design and produce architectural projects without any irregularities.
In addition to these, we follow to select the structural system as symmetrically as possible for building safety and follow a detailed approach. To increase the durability rate specific to the sensitive dynamics of data center projects, we use a high percentage of curtains in proportion to the total area, use insulators, FRP reinforcement works where necessary, and continuous and regular field supervision practices. As Serban, we always make this experience felt in all completed and ongoing projects under our contract in data center construction, in which we are highly experienced, and we are proud to show our difference."