Data Centre Cooling – A Revolution In The Way You Store Your Servers

Your servers are some of the most important, if not the most important, assets available to your business. Unless you have extensive online backup (which, by the way, is recommended) then your servers are effectively the final location of everything your business is: all transactions, all your files and all your sensitive information. When the servers go down, everything goes down – which is of course why they are to be protected at all costs. Protecting servers, though, is no easy task – they’re hot, they’re sensitive, and they have to be on 24 hours a day. If they overheat, they die – taking your business with them. Data centre cooling is intrinsic to the well being of your company.

The more servers you have, the more you need to be investing in cooling your data centre. Think of it as the combined heart and brain of your whole operation. If the heart and brain shuts down, the body dies.

The air-con made up for the temperature rise caused by a group of working servers being held in a confined space. Servers get hot when they work, and have to be cooled by internal fans: but when there are a lot of them, and they are placed in a room, heat becomes a real problem. Simply adding more air-conditioning is not a solution; data centres more often then not have their air-con turned up as high as possible and still have areas where there are hotspots. Most data centres have server racks that ca not be fully populated due to hot spots.

Fortunately, there’s a tried and tested solution called “cold aisle containment”. Rather than simply masking the hot air created by the servers, by a wash of cold air, a cold aisle containment solution separates the hot and cold air in your data centre. It is much easier and more efficient to cool just the aisles which are front facing to your server then the whole room. The fronts of the server cabinets, in this data centre cooling model, are closed off – so only the cold air rising through the floor can be in direct contact with the front of the servers.

The backs of the servers – where the hot air is vented – are left open. That means that the exhaust air rises out of them, and is sucked back into the chillers for cooling and recirculation. This method of keeping the data centre cool allows for a much larger number of servers to be used in the same space, air-cons will have to work less harder, your energy bills will reduce and your servers will work more efficiently.

By: Hem Nathwani

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Keyzone offers a full range of datacentre solutions, from Server Rack,KVM and Power products to Data centre cooling. www.keyzone.com/Data_Centre_Solutions/Cold_Aisle_Containment.htm"> data centre cooling