Hot & Cold Aisle Containment
Data center containment strategies have been growing in popularity over recent years, and are now widely regarded across the IT industry as the best place to start when looking for energy efficiency best practices in the data center or server room. When it comes to containment, many data center managers don’t know which approach is best for their own unique data center.
Technology Connection believes the best containment strategy largely depends on the application itself. Each unique server room and data center requires a unique solution, with some benefitting more from hot aisle containment, and other possibly limited to cold aisle containment because of physical facility constraints and limitations. Technology Connection believes the most important thing to consider with containment however is that improperly implemented containment can be as bad or worse than no containment at all. Availability can be seriously affected when airflow dynamics and pressure differentials are not properly accounted for.
Hot Aisle Containment
Goal: To capture the hot exhaust from IT equipment and direct it to the CRAC units as efficiently as possible.
- Good for data centers with existing hot air return systems.
- Density supported dependent on overall server room environment.
Cold Aisle Containment
Goal: To isolate the cold air in a “room” of its own.
- Good for existing data centers without hot air return.
- Focuses on cooling IT equipment instead of the entire room.
- Density supported dependent on overall server room environment.