I have been working in the Data Centre business for many years and every time I take on a new role I get a surprise.  A surprise that the basics are not done, that the lessons I learned all those years ago still haven’t reached this far!  I guess that I should have stopped being surprised by now, but it still gets me every time.

That brings me to the subject of why this blog is called the hot aisle?  Well one of the basic data centre rules is that cooling efficiency can be enhanced (lots) by separating hot and cold air flows. So rather than laying our cabinets front to back, front to back they should be laid out front to front and back to back.  That means that the back to back aisle gets hot (as most equipment exhausts its hot air from the front to the back) and all of the open floor tiles ought to be in the front to front aisle, the cold aisle.  The picture above shows a pretty reasonable layout.

Note that the cabinets are laid out back to back with ventilated tiles in front of the cabinet front doors.  Much more can be done to improve this but this is a reasonable starting position.

The hot aisle has another meaning for me in that keeping the lights on with IT Infrastructure is a pretty hot job, (I have made a 30 year career out of it) and that can it can get pretty hot when things go wrong.  So lots of meanings in one phrase – the hot aisle.