Hot Aisle Or Cold Aisle For Containment?

1sockchuck writes "Separating the hot and cold air in a data center is one of the keys to improving energy efficiency. But containment systems don't have to be fancy or expensive, as Google showed in a presentation Thursday, which discussed the use of clear vinyl curtains in isolating hot and cold aisles. Containment systems have been in use at least since 2004, but there's an ongoing debate about whether it is best to contain the hot aisle or cold aisle. Leading vendors are split as well, as APC advances hot aisle containment while Emerson/Liebert champions a cold aisle approach. What say Slashdot readers? Do you use containment in your data center? If so, do you contain the hot aisle or cold aisle?"

Comments

Re:Can you try both methods?

[twisteddk]

Well, as most companies that have to build a new datacenter will tell you. It's cheaper to generate heat than cold. So I'd go for cold containment. Generally speaking most companies do AIM to put their new datacenters as close to the north pole as possible simply because it's cheaper to use outside air that's natually cold. That puts countries like Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland in high demand for datacenters (end technicians to staff them). If the US didn't have rediculous data laws, Alska might also be ideal.

In our new datacenter we're even using the excess heating from the servers to heat the offices ontop of the giant basements below. This sort of setup is ideal for outside temperatures that generally range below the normal cooling needs of a server (or several). But in any event there's still a huge bill to pay for moving the air back and forth, so containment is definately still an issue, as is the size of the pipes when you have say... 10MW of electricity going into your servers and quite a lot of that energy coming back out as heat ;)