In an effort to run a greener datacenter and reduce the company’s carbon footprint, we have decided to implement a “Cold Aisle Containment” initiative at our Los Angles datacenter.
The project is well under way and is scheduled to be completed in October 2016.
The project is based on “Focused Cooling” where the cold aisles are designed to contain cold air generated from the datacenter cooling units by installing doors and tops to the aisles in between racks. Rows of racks are positioned so that two rows have the cold sides facing each other and the hot sides facing the opposite directions. The contained row in the middle becomes the cold air aisle.
By containing the cold air in cold aisles, we not only increase the cooling capacity but also increase the cooling efficiency of the datacenter. In a contained cold aisle, the ambient temperature of the air is lowered allowing the cooling systems to maintain the cool air more efficiently. This also results in a reduced energy cost for the datacenter by allowing the equipment fans to operate at less than full speed.
Since our Los Angeles datacenter was already configured with separate hot and cold aisle rows, creating a containment plan was an obvious solution in reducing our overall energy consumption.
In addition to the environmental impact and cost savings attributes of a cold aisle containment configuration, there are fault tolerant advantages as well. In the unfortunate event of a cooling unit going down, having the cold air contained in the aisles allows the other AC units to deal with the added workload more effectively and adds to the overall redundancy of the facility.
