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AIRSTOP AIR AISLE
There has been a
great deal of buzz lately throughout the data center industry
concerning cold aisle containment systems. Cold aisle containment
enhances the hot aisle/cold aisle design by retaining the cold air
in the cold aisle. By closing off the ends of the cold aisles, it
stops the cold air from escaping. This provides more consistent
inlet temperatures to the servers while helping the CRAC units to
operate more efficiently with higher inlet temperatures.
The hot-aisle /cold-aisle design is a long-standing data center best
practice. It requires lining up server racks in alternating rows
with cold-air intakes all facing one aisle and hot-air exhausts
facing the other. Over the past several years, it became the de
facto standard. But as server densities have increased, efficiency
gains have consequently eroded.
In a typical data center that is configured using hot aisles and
cold aisles, the cold air from the cold aisles wraps around the ends
of the aisles and mixes with the hot air before it has a chance to
get to the CRAC. This lowers the exhaust air temperature before it
returns to the CRAC inlet. Lower CRAC return temperatures cause the
CRACs to short cycle which causes additional inefficiencies and
higher energy costs to operate.
With so much effort underway to improve the efficiency of data
centers, cold aisle plastic curtains are one of the proven ways to
accomplish this. Storage vendor NetApp uses similar curtains in
their data center and says that curtains alone save them 1 million
kWh of energy per year. One of the USA Yahoo data centers uses them
as well.
The Airstop Aisle Curtain system by Data Clean Asia helps to retain
the cold air in the cold aisle therefore making the data center more
efficient. Call Data Clean Asia for more information or to set up a
demo of the Airstop Aisle Curtains.
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