If you have a data center, you must know what an ingress protection rating is. IP ratings are given to electricity-powered products with many moving parts. Sound familiar? This is a snapshot of how protected your cables, servers, and data cabinets are against any accidents, specifically around solids and liquids. What does that mean? In this brief guide to ingress protection ratings, we’ll describe each type.
Solid State Protection
Let’s break down what an “IP43” rating means for ingress protection. First, the “IP” is short for “ingress protection.” In this case, the “4”—the first digit of the text line—refers to how much protection an electronic product has against dust, body parts, and solids in general.
The rating ranges from zero, when the item has no protection at all, to six, indicating full protection and resistance to small particulates, dust, and even larger solids. The word “solid” could also indicate insects accidentally flying into your enclosures or getting in between your servers, or even accidents with tools and wires.
Liquid Ingress Protection
Let’s look one more time at that same rating, “IP43”. The “3,” in this case, indicates how much liquid ingress protection there is for a given electronic, as with solid-state protection. A rating of zero indicates no protection, while a rating of 9K is generally considered waterproof. 9K protection is pretty powerful; it indicates resistance to high-powered water jets at close range with high temperatures. Of course, not everything—especially not in your data center—will have this rating. This is an important part of our guide to ingress protection ratings.
What Can You Expect for Your Data Center?
For the average run-of-the-mill data center with heating and cooling mechanisms and humidity monitoring, you can expect an IP rating of IP20. As you could probably guess, most electronics don’t mesh well with water, although you might be able to get away with bumping it or a low-impact accident. For most server rack manufacturing companies, this option is standard.
Ingress protection ratings are important, but it’s also important to have something that will protect your electronics. Learn more about our products here at AMCO Enclosures! You’ll be happy you took a look at our data cabinets!