Server Room Cooling Systems

The proper operating environment for a server room is established by ASHRAE. Over the years, ASHRAE has slowly adapted its guidelines to the much faster changing state of the IT industry with respect to server room cooling requirements. Following is the current ASHRAE server room cooling guidance:

Server equipment generates and dissipates heat exactly equivalent to the amount of power it consumes from the source that feeds it. However, properly sizing server room cooling takes into account more than just the heat generated by the IT infrastructure. Calculating the heat load must include losses in power protection and distribution, lighting, heat gain through walls, floor, windows, and/or ceilings, and even the people that will be in the space.

Further, proper server room cooling system design takes into account more than just the mathematical comparison between the heat load demand of the room and the cooling capacity of the air conditioner equipment serving it. Proper server room cooling system design must also account for the layout and configuration of the cooling equipment, the IT load components, racks, and/or cabinets as well as the obstacles affecting air flow. As such, beside a numerical tabulation to select the ideal server room cooling equipment, PTS uses a computational fluid dynamic modeling to verify the design assumptions for the server rooms cooling system under both normal operating and failure scenario conditions.