Data Centre cold aisle containment

[coolhandlew]

Hello everyone,

I'm just trying to think of a way to save a bit of energy.

In a data centre, I have a room with a design heat load of 200kW. Currently installed are 4 x 100kW DX units. (for N+1 redundancy). The units are downflow to a floor plenum with louvred floor tiles located in the cold aisle. The hot air is ducted back to the units. This ductwork is obviously above the hot aisle but is not sealed to the racks. Consequently there is some leakage of air over the top of the racks and around the end of the aisle. It would be very difficult to retrofit containment to the hot aisle to seal it up due to cable routing etc.

It would be easy however to install containment to the cold aisle, a rack to ceiling curtain with doors at either end. Then all of the conditioned air would pass through the racks. I was considering attempting to control the units on supply air temp, maybe with a sensor located within the cold aisle set at around 21^o​C.

I was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts about controlling to supply air setpoint?

The installed units do not control humidity, they are cooling only.

[al]

This data center is a few years old now but was designed from the start for cold and hot aisle containment.

http://www.cix.ie/#/about/facilities

Runs on fresh air most of the time, controls on supply air temp.

i don't think you can do the same, the room needs full containment with the hot air extracted, well worth your while to convince the owners to adopt this approach for any new racks installed.