Air Containment Solutions
Data centre facility managers continue to face challenges of coping with ever increasing demand for M&E capacity to support more high density IT equipment.
Air Containment is a low cost, high value approach to increasing the effectiveness of your current air conditioning, enabling you to:
- Significantly reduce the power cost associated with supporting your current IT requirement
- Defer the expensive M&E upgrade cost of supporting increased IT demand
- Improve cooling for high density racks.
How it Works
Classic data centre design incorporates the concept of hot and cold aisles in order to better direct cold air from the air conditioning system to the input side of the IT equipment.
Air Containment is an engineered solution that fully separates hot exhaust and cold input air flows within the data centre white space, preventing significant quantities of the cold air bypassing equipment cabinets and returning mixed with the hot air to the CRAC units. Typically unwanted mixture is compensated for by running the air conditioning system at a lower temperature than would otherwise be required, using scarce capacity and incurring avoidable significant additional energy cost.
Hot or Cold Aisle Containment?
There are essentially two different approaches based on either containing the hot aisles or the cold aisles in the data centre.
The industry continues to debate the relative efficiency benefits from each option. In reality, the approach you take should be dependent on your own specific business drivers and objectives in relation to your current data centre situation. Keyzone empowers its clients with the necessary facts to make an informed decision. Nevertheless, if you plan to design and commission a new data centre facility with new IT equipment you have more options available to you to achieve air flow separation. To significantly improve the effectiveness of a current data centre requires a solution that can be easily retro-fitted. Keyzone is able to provide this with extremely cost effective options that are rapid and non-disruptive to install and maintain.
Additional Benefits
By increasing air pressure in the cold aisle and not allowing hot air to mix in, Air Containment also has the potential to reduce the risk of IT service failure in two key ways:
- By accelerating the flow of cold air into servers, even to those in the top third of the cabinet*, in turn decreasing fan loading and technology operating temperatures, thereby extending server life span
- Note * - 74% of server failures occur in the top third of the rack where the temperature is normally higher
- By creating a cold air buffer that can delay the thermal shut down of IT equipment in the event of an air conditioning failure.