CASE STUDY
Contained Cold Aisle Solution for a Limited Space Facility Making Short Work of It By Samantha Slater
You know that space that was written off in the past because of the low floor to ceiling clearance? Might it be possible to find a way to make use of it to generate revenue?
Casablanca INT, one of the largest providers of data services in the Czech Republic, has opened a new Data Hall using Conteg’s Total Solutions cold aisle containment as the supporting framework. In the 200 sqm hall there are 112 customer positions in the sixty four 42U data racks (40 full racks, 12 half partitioned and 12 quarter partitioned rack positions) arranged in two cold aisle blocks for IT equipment and one for the UPS system. Casablanca’s technical team
demanded a highly efficient, scalable solution for the new facility in an area which had limited floor space to add perimeter CRAC units and around 2-3 metres of floor to ceiling clearance. After careful analysis, a contained cold aisle solution was selected. The aim was to create an infrastructure which would enable the most effective use of floor space, electrical capacity and distribution of cooling air. Taking into account other factors, such as existing chilled water capacity, electrical distribution capacity and floor space for the UPS, the data centre was designed for a 4 kW thermal load per rack and N +1 redundancy in each of the cold aisle containment blocks.
Rittal – The System. Along with full size 42U equipment
cabinets, the project required two types of segregated 42U equipment cabinet, one with four separate sections and one with two separate sections. Each section had to be able to provide secured network and power cabling access and secure front and rear doors which could only be opened by the customer. These cabinets had to have the same air management features as the other cabinets. The project had to offer fully redundant power supply through two independent branches. Total data centre IT power consumption was rated at 300 kW. Contained aisle designs (cold or hot)
are used in many contemporary data centre projects. This type of design utilises a containment system for physical separation of the hot or cold air streams (zones) and eliminates the recirculation of warm air into the cooled air space from which air is returned to the installed IT equipment, as well as, in the case of cold aisle containment, preventing leakage of cooled air outside the contained area. Another aspect of the cold aisle design is the significant reduction in the volume of cooled air in the data centre. To keep all the
advantages of contained aisle it is critical that blanking panels be installed in all vacant rack spaces. One exception to the standard practice for this project was that because of the low floor to ceiling clearance the aisle roof panel in some areas was replaced by the bottom of the room’s plenum ceiling. Generally, side mount (in-row) cooling
units can be utilised in two ways when using cold aisle containment. One is to supplement existing CRAC/CRAH units by adding additional cooling capacity and the second is to use solid tiles or no raised floor as the main source for cooled air. For this project, since there was insufficient floor space to add perimeter CRAC units, the latter option proved best. Properly sized in-row cooling units are installed in strategic locations within the row of racks which draw in the warm air expelled from the IT equipment, cool the air and return it to the front of the equipment at a predetermined temperature set point. The in-row units which were used
required only 300 mm wide spaces within the row of equipment cabinets. To provide N+1 redundancy, one extra unit was added to each of cold aisles. To ensure proper airflow, the front and
ENCLOSURES 44 NETCOMMS Volume I, Issue 4 2011
POWER DISTRIBUTION
CLIMATE
www.netcommseurope.com
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