Your data center is running more workloads, supporting more business functionality, and is a critical part of the entire organization. Business leaders are relying on the capabilities of their IT environments. Still, through it all, they’re still asking for greater energy savings and more efficiency. A lot of these conversations come down to power and power utilization.
The challenge, however, are older schools of thought around power consumption within the data center, and how to optimize it for energy savings. It is time to finally get over the misconceptions generated by the loud and misleading rhetoric regarding the superior efficiencies of close-coupled and liquid cooled server cabinet solutions, as well as the supposed limits on power densities that can be effectively cooled by air. Passive air cooling can successfully dissipate as much heat as can be generated by commercial servers that can actually fit in a 42-45 U cabinet, and in fact more than most close-coupled and liquid-cooled solutions. In addition, as Ian Seaton, Data Center Consultant for CPI points out in this white paper, air-cooled solutions that rely on complete isolation between supply air and return air are more efficient than most close-coupled systems and provide access to lower data center cooling costs.
Download this white paper from the Data Center Frontier White Paper Library
More important than power density, however, is the customer’s costs for cooling these densities, and there is no more efficient, lower cost way of cooling a data center than with the above-described ducted system. The two basic factors affecting this higher efficiency are 100% utilization of HVAC output and an access path to more hours of economization cooling.
With the ducted exhaust system, every bit of cold air produced by the HVAC system has to go through a server:
- The only path between supply air and return air is one of heat transfer through a server, so there is no waste;
- There is no bypass and no need for the over-provisioning that is required in standard hot aisle/cold aisle data centers.
The efficiency claims of close-coupled and liquid-cooled solutions are based on comparisons to inherently inefficient data centers with a high amount of bypass air, and over-provisioning of cooling necessitated by the extreme variations in pressure and airflow throughout a room. Because of the traditional dependencies on air delivered through proximate perforated access floor tiles, cooling capacity provisioning formulas have had to plan for providing adequate air to the lowest airflow spot in a room, resulting in typically 200-300% over-provisioning, resulting in huge amounts of wasted bypass air. When it no longer matters where the cold air is delivered and when 100% of it must travel through a server, there is no longer a need for that over-provisioning and therefore there is no more waste.
Download this whitepaper today to learn how ducted cabinet return air isolation raises the bar by a factor of 4 or 5 for heat densities and provides much more efficient cooling at a lower initial investment than close-coupled or liquid cooled solutions. Most of all, you’ll learn how to reduce waste, improve data center efficiency, and improve power consumption models. Click here to download.