Equipment

Submitted by: Saleh Tousi

The hot aisle/cold aisle system is an innovative approach to managing temperatures in a data center. Most of the energy that is required to run data center that offers collocation is spent on cooling efforts, making sure the temperature is just right for a machine. When cooling fails, servers and equipment can also fail. Every kind of method used to tackle the heat problem of running several machines at the same time and in the same place has its own deficiencies and the ultimate solution remains to be discovered. The hot aisle/cold aisle approach is known in the industry as the best cooling design because it directs hot and cold air to designated areas in the data center so that the two temperature levels do not interfere with each other, thus creating separate spaces where cold air can stay cold and hot air can stay hot.

In a hot aisle/cold aisle design, servers in a data center are placed on racks in parallel rows. The front ends of the servers are arranged so as to be facing each other, and the back ends likewise. Floors in the aisles where the front ends of servers meet are punctured so that air conditioning coming from beneath the surface can flow upward and onto the air-intake vents of the servers. Adjacent to this cool aisle (which literally is cold), you have the hot aisle, where the servers are spitting out hot air and now releasing it up into the data center s vents where it can be disposed of.

The weak spot of a hot aisle/cold aisle cooling system lies in the fact that not all servers exhaust hot air out from their back ends. Some servers are designed to take cold air in from the top or side panels of their boxed shell and then let hot air out from the bottom or top. This can, in effect, nullify the efficiency of the hot aisle/cold aisle cooling system because air traffic won t be flowing to its designated areas. When this is the case, you can end up with a mix of hot and cold air in a data center aisle, disturbing the cooling process and putting a crunch on energy expenses.

There are, however, ways of working around the hardware ventilation variations. In some cases, it may be possible to redirect air flow within the hardware to ensure cold air comes in through the front of the server and hot air goes out through the back. In other scenarios, data centers can flock together similarly-designed servers in different areas of the facility and arrange them so that air traffic follows the same direction in every instance.

Still, the hot aisle/cold aisle system creates the best conditions for server survival in a data center. As in any system, measures need to be taken to ensure that all the related components are installed and working properly. For example, duties might include patching up holes in hot aisles that can invade cold temperatures in the adjacent aisles.

About the Author: Saleh Tousi is the CEO of SmarttNet, a Vancouver IT company offering comprehensive business Internet services including

Vancouver colocation

since 1995.

Source:

isnare.com

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