No code for paint type, or color. Use egg shell finish, latex, make sure to paint wall below raised floor as well as above. If area below floor is not painted drywall dust, which contains small metal particles could be inhaled into servers.
I was actually googling for this exact question a little bit ago. I have seen datacenter that had white walls or offwhite walls that are constantly banged up and what not and darker datacenter walls that do not show wear and tare as much....
I have a pondering thought about whether or not there is truth behind the fact of black or dark walls absorb heat. Heat obviously is attracted to dark things so do you think it will have any benefit to a datacenter environment. As an ex employee of Equinix, I know that we standardized on a really dark grey bluish coloured walls as well as a painted black roof on the inside and white gravel on the rooftop.. Perhaps this was more of the equinix effect as opposed to a beneficial effect.
Any thoughts greatly appreciated as I have a build coming up very soon!
If you paint the walls a dark color it will not eliminate heat from the data center. The heat you will be generating must be handled by your environmentals.
As a work environment, I like a data center to have lots of available light, so techs can see what they're doing. Off-white walls give much better usable ambient light than dark ones and so minimize human errors which, according to the Uptime Institute, account for 80% of data center outages. I doubt interior wall tones significantly affect the thermodynamics of the facility.
The heat generated by the servers is not in the form of radiation but in the form of thermal air particle kinetic energy.
So a dark wall does nothing to absorb such type of energy.
Maybe there could be a better heat absorbing paint/wall finish, but that really should not play the major role in a DC.
Do not forget that them the walls would have to be cooled ... as they would act as a Thermal Capacitor to the overall system ...
The major role they should play is the very important thermal insulation from outside heat.
White walls reflect light better therefore minimizing illumination needs and also provide a better vision for the DC staff and that could eliminate human errors that could cost far more them anything else.