• • • CASE STUDY • • •
InRow Direct Expansion (DX) technology, utilising a refrigerant vapour expansion and compression cycle. The condensing elements have been located on the roof of the data centre, conveniently freeing up significant ground space on the site formerly used for a cooling plant. Following on from an open tender, UCD selected
Total Power Solutions, a Schneider Electric Elite Partner, to deliver the cooling update project. Total Power Solutions had previously carried out several power and cooling infrastructure installations and upgrades on the campus and is considered a trusted supplier to the university. Working together with Schneider Electric,
Total Power Solutions was responsible for the precise design of an optimum solution to meet the data centre’s needs and its integration into the existing infrastructure.
A major consideration was to minimise disruption to the data centre layout, keeping in place the Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Row Data Centre System (formerly called a Hot Aisle Containment Solution, or HACS). The containment solution is a valued component of the physical infrastructure, ensuring efficient thermal management of the IT equipment and maximising the efficiency of the cooling effort by minimising the mixing of the cooled supply air and hot return – or exhaust - airstream.
The new cooling system provides a highly efficient, close-coupled approach which is particularly suited to high density loads. Each InRow DX unit draws air directly from the hot aisle, taking advantage of higher heat transfer efficiency and discharges room-temperature air directly in front of the cooling load. Placing the unit in the
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • JULY/AUGUST 2023 41
row yielding 100% sensible capacity and significantly reduces the need for humidification. Cooling efficiency is a critical requirement for operating a low PUE data centre, but the most obvious benefit of the upgraded cooling system is the built-in resilience afforded by the 10 independent DX cooling units. No longer is there a single point of failure; there is currently sufficient redundancy in the system that if one of the units fails, the others can take up the slack and continue delivering cooling with no impairment of the computing equipment in the data centre.
“We calculated that we might just have managed with eight separate cooling units,” said Mr Cannon, “but we wanted the additional resilience and fault tolerance that using ten units gave us.”
Additional benefits of the new solution include its efficiency – the system is now sized according to the IT load and avoids the overcooling of the data centre both to reduce energy use and improve its PUE.
In addition, the new cooling system is scalable according to the potential requirement to add
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