Will the Design Use Any Form of Air Containment?

Studies have shown that aisle containment will improve the efficiency of the cooling environment by up to 30%.  Beyond this raw cooling efficiency improvement aisle containment will provide an additional solution to a really difficult issue – High Density Server implementations.

Standard datacenter cabinet layouts typically utilize hot aisle / cold aisle design with two floor tiles of width for the cold aisle.  Assuming an under-floor cooling air supply and perforated floor tiles allowing the maximum amount of airflow possible, approximately 5 KW of IT load can be cooled per perforated floor-tile.  Obviously, this is problematic for high density racks. 

There are only a few ways to address this.  One way is to increase the spacing between the rows to provide more cooling tiles per cabinet.  This trades off space versus technical complexity.  Another way is to provide aisle containment –both hot and cold aisle containment is possible, with different results.

Using cold aisle containment with distributed, modular In-Row cooling rack densities can be increased to 20 KW, and with some added complexity – up to 30 KW per cabinet.

There are lots of vendor solutions available to provide some form of containment.  Our recommendation is to use one that will maintain the integrity of the design while the contained cabinets are undergoing change.  You do not want your entire cooling scheme to fall apart if you need to open a cabinet door to add a server or a cable.

At NewVista we have successfully used aisle containment on several projects where either the available space or technical density have demanded such an approach