Results Of A Chaotic Air Distribution In Data Center Cooling

By Author: Cyrus Joseph
Total Articles: 58
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Because of the rising power densities as well as the increasing heat level on most companies these days, the data center cooling strategies have greatly evolved over time. In the recent times, most of the cooling schemes have greatly relied on the so called chaotic air distribution methods, where the perimeter computer room air conditioning units have pumped out great volumes of cool air which helps to cool IT equipment and at the same time, help to push out hot server exhaust air in the direction of the facility’s return air ducts. The chaotic distribution often results to a wide range of significant inefficiency that resulted to the following situations.

Re-circulation

One of the things that could happen on a chaotic data center cooling strategies is re-circulation. Re-circulation often happens as a result of poor rack hygiene as well as the insufficient cool air that is available at the face of the rack. The hot exhaust air could find its way towards the server air intakes and thus, heating the IT equipment at a dangerous temperature.

Air Stratification

In an effort to provide an even ...
... cooler air when it comes to data center cooling, the natural tendency of air to mass on varying temperature based layers could force set points on the precision cooling equipment to result in lower than what’s recommended. Oftentimes, in an attempt to find solutions to air stratification, several technicians will try hard to improve the speed of the fan of the CRAC units in order to deliver more cool air within the room and thus, it could bypass the air.

Bypass Air

As stated, another thing that could happen in a chaotic data center cooling is that air will be bypassed. The velocity of the cool air stream will exceed the ability of the server fans will draw some cool air in and therefore, the cool air will shoot beyond the face of the IT system’s rack. The cool supply of air can therefore join the return air stream right before passing towards the servers, thereby the cooling efficiency will be weakened.

In order to combat all these inefficiencies and in order to keep up with the pace of the steadily climbing data center cooling temperatures, several businesses have adopted the hot aisle and cold aisle rack orientation arrangement where only hot air exhausts as well as cool air intakes will face each other right within a given row of the server racks. This configuration will generate convection currents that will produce a highly improved airflow. It may be superior to the chaotic air distribution, the hot aisle and cold aisle data center cooling strategies have been proven to be more capable of cooling the increasingly dense data centers in this day and age. This could be because both of these approaches will ultimately share common flaw – they both allow air to be able to move freely within the data center. Such flaws have eventually resulted to the creation of containment data center cooling strategies.

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