Cold Aisle Containment

For many data centre owners capital outlay in replacing/upgrading CRAC units or installing rack based cooling is too high, particularly at a time when futures are uncertain and organizations want to remain flexible. Aisle containment enables such organizations to improve efficiency without excessive CAPEX and without locking the organization in to a particular technology path.

What is Cold Aisle Containment?

Aisle containment is the physical separation of air bodies in aisles between the cabinets in a data centre; i.e. hot air ejected from the rear of the cabinets is physically separated from cold air entering the front of the cabinets.

This is a low cost means of reducing energy costs and can reduce load on the CRAC unit by as much as 70%.

Because no hot air enters the cold aisle, air entering the front of the cabinets is on average 4 degrees cooler than in a non sealed aisle.

Also because the cold aisle is sealed the volume of cold air needed to provide the required cooling duty is smaller and puts less demand on the cooling plant.

Advantages of cold aisle containment

 

• PUE improvements without significant investment
• Increases the life time of existing cooling plant
• Accommodates multiple vendors cabinets of different heights and widths
• Can be installed with no disruption or risk to data centre operations
• Customer installable
• Solution easily accommodates future change in the data centre