This basically comes down to a question of APC vs Liebert equipment. APC pushes hot aisle containment where Leibert pushes cold aisle containment. It seems like the benefits are almost split 50/50, but there are a few other things to consider. The APC method uses in-row cooling, which means you are moving the the air less distance than the Liebert method of pushing air from large CRACs at the ends of the aisles.
There are efficiencies gained in other methods, and as a poster earlier mentioned the APC method is a little cheaper up front. This does introduce the problem of water in the data center, but for us we resolved this by putting the water under the floor so that it would be very difficult to have any issues related to it.
Overall, I think this comes down to the situation, but for us it made more sense to do hot aisle containment. It seems to be better in smaller scale situations, but I would have to do more research to see how it scales to large 50,000+ sqft data centers.
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This basically comes down to a question of APC vs Liebert equipment. APC pushes hot aisle containment where Leibert pushes cold aisle containment. It seems like the benefits are almost split 50/50, but there are a few other things to consider. The APC method uses in-row cooling, which means you are moving the the air less distance than the Liebert method of pushing air from large CRACs at the ends of the aisles. There are efficiencies gained in other methods, and as a poster earlier mentioned the APC method is a little cheaper up front. This does introduce the problem of water in the data center, but for us we resolved this by putting the water under the floor so that it would be very difficult to have any issues related to it. Overall, I think this comes down to the situation, but for us it made more sense to do hot aisle containment. It seems to be better in smaller scale situations, but I would have to do more research to see how it scales to large 50,000+ sqft data centers.