Furthermore, if you speak to the insiders at most of the modern equipment manufacturers, they will tell you that the benchmarking processes are now done on solid, non-raised floor environments.
The assumption is tonage of cooling is provided at the intake, which is not located at the bottom of the larger machines, but at the front or back.
The hot aisle/cold aisle methodology is still the only viable means for cooling high power density equipment in a large datacenter environment. The only remaining issue is how to get rid of the hot air, and clearly the simplest initial design criteria should be high ceilings (hard to find in datacenters). Outside of that, high velocity air, specially designed air returns, or compartmentalized racks with dedicated air returns are alternatives.
In most flow dynamic studies, you find raised floors are riddled with statification, hot air being delivered back into the intakes of other gear, whereas in non-raised hot-aisle/cold-aisle, this problem magically goes away...
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Furthermore, if you speak to the insiders at most of the modern equipment manufacturers, they will tell you that the benchmarking processes are now done on solid, non-raised floor environments. The assumption is tonage of cooling is provided at the intake, which is not located at the bottom of the larger machines, but at the front or back. The hot aisle/cold aisle methodology is still the only viable means for cooling high power density equipment in a large datacenter environment. The only remaining issue is how to get rid of the hot air, and clearly the simplest initial design criteria should be high ceilings (hard to find in datacenters). Outside of that, high velocity air, specially designed air returns, or compartmentalized racks with dedicated air returns are alternatives. In most flow dynamic studies, you find raised floors are riddled with statification, hot air being delivered back into the intakes of other gear, whereas in non-raised hot-aisle/cold-aisle, this problem magically goes away...