Room-Based Cooling Solutions

Traditional data center, computer room, and server room cooling methodologies provide room-oriented cooling which provides an entire room with cold air from centralized units at one end of the room. This approach is acceptable when power densities are minimal and, therefore, there are few hot spots in a room.

Effective Room-Based Cooling approaches start with well understood Key Design Criteria to understand the total cooling requirement, areas of possible hot-spots, design elements (I.e. raised floor, ceiling mounted air ducts), room architecture, hot-aisle/cold-aisle containment strategies to name a few requirements and design considerations.

In large data centers Room-Based Cooling Solutions remain the most economical approach to cooling and, where appropriate and necessary, can be deployed in a hybrid environment with Row-Based Cooling Solutions and Rack-Based Cooling solutions. This approach is beneficial to data centers operating with a broad spectrum of rack power densities.

In this approach each of the types of cooling solutions approaches plays a role to provide cooling throughout the facility:

• Room-Based: Supplying a room but primarily serving a low density area of mixed equipment such as communications equipment, low density servers, and storage.
• Row-Based: Supplying a high density or ultra-high density area with blade servers or 1U servers.
• Rack-Based: Supplying isolated high density racks or ultra-high density racks

Manufacturers provide small-room and large-room oriented cooling systems. In many cased small-room cooling can be efficiently deployed using Rack-Based cooling solutions and appropriate isolation solutions and heat rejection solutions. For large-room deployments designs may include the cooling systems deployed within the data center, computer room, or server room, heat rejection solutions, and economizers.