Are bare steel floor tiles suitable for a server room?

We're moving in to a new building, soon. Most of the building has a raised access floor consisting of 600x600mm square tiles; galvanised steel-coated MDF. (The closest equivalent I can find is Tate Woodcore.) These tiles are pre-drilled and screwed at the corners to supporting stacks on the concrete floor. The void is about 4".

The comms room, on the 2nd floor, also has these tiles. Our specification was that they would bond a hard-wearing, anti-static vinyl on to the individual tiles such as to allow them to be lifted easily at a later date. It now transpires that this isn't a good idea, since the vinyl would have to be cut to fit and would be prone to damage and rucking at the tile corners.

The choice I face now is to either replace the floor tiles entirely with something more suitable, or to simply polish the existing bare tiles and stick with those (the latter is actually how we found the room).

Bare tiles would certainly be easier and cheaper, but will a bare metal floor cause me any problems that I can only mitigate by replacing them?

Notes

• There is no ventilation requirement in the floor void. There is only power, fibre and a lot of Cat6.
• We'll have ~4 tons of cooling from two ceiling mounted A/C units
• At full capacity, we'll have 4 cabs (3 servers and an MDF). Nothing else will be stored in the room.

No problem, as far as I know. I have been involved in 2 server-room builds with similar floors a couple of years ago. Never had any issues besides that metal may be a slip-hazard. It it is too slippery you can always apply some anti-slip coating over the tiles.

I do have a few recommendations though:

• It can't hurt to have a little airflow under the floor. CAT6 and power do dissipate some heat. Also condensation may build up. The holes you cut for the cabling going into the racks while be mostly filled with cable and have little airflow. Just replace 2 tiles (1 on the cold side of the room, 1 on the warm side) with a grate. (Or cut a hole in a plate and place a grate over that hole.) Natural convection will do the rest.
• You will have to bring in a proper electrical earth for the racks anyway. Attach it to the floor as well. Won't cost you any extra and it certainly can't hurt.
• This is more of a general piece of advice when dealing with AC units. If they use a liquid coolant install a fluid detector/alarm under the floor. A coolant leak (in the AC unit itself or in the plumbing going to the condensers outside) may go undetected for a while as long as cooling capacity isn't overly affected. But you don't want the coolant to pool under the floor. Bear in mind that chemicals in the coolant have a nasty tendency to dissolve plastic shielding around your cables !

That floor system sounds very similar to what we had at a previous job, and over the raised floor panels we had identically-sized ESD carpet tiles. I have no idea what brand any of it was, but a quick google for ESD carpet tiles gave me this, for one

The carpet tiles we had were fairly thick and heavy (7 or 8mm thick, I'd guess) and were glued to the floor panels, but the glue wasn't too strong and they were easy to pull up when we needed to. We never re-applied any glue to hold them back down, they were heavy enough to just sit there.

The only picture I can find is this blast from the past (Man, I loved those MicroVAXes and that AlphaServer 2100 4/275!):

Looking at the picture, I remember that the carpet tiles were offset from the floor panels. We dragged things over the carpet all the time and the tiles never pulled loose or suffered any damage.