All Posts Tagged With: "Plenum Floor"
Data Centre design is an evolutionary process and we can see the first signs of significant change in the latest sites. Co-generation, liquid cooling, cloud computing, high density are all likely to feature in the 2020 Data Centre. How are you placed with your existing Data Centre investments to take advantage of these changes? Will [...]
Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling, reliability and economics. So what’s different this year from prior years?
Strengthening fundamental drivers will likely make 2010 materially different from [...]
I am on the West Coast of the US this week visiting with NetApp in Sunnyvale again. On this trip I had the opportunity to visit a couple of NetApp’s internal data centers (B11 and the impressive B2 sites) with Cesar Orosco, NetApp on NetApp IT Architect. Cesar is charged with using NetApp technology in [...]
We are all trying to fix the unfixable in the Data Centre. How do we get more cooling capacity from sites we built a decade ago for low power density applications?
One of the biggest problems is that everyone is trying to work against a basic law of physics; hot air rises, and cold air falls. [...]
Our atmosphere (the air around us) is made up of gasses consisting of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), carbon dioxide (0.3%) and water in the form of vapor (humidity). The amount of water in the atmosphere is measured as a Relative Humidity (RH)
Data Center air should contain the proper amount of water vapor to maximize the availability [...]
I had two great questions from Hot Aisle readers following the latest article on Cold Aisle containment. Dan asked about the impact on fire suppression and Mark asked about where we got the transparent curtains.
Lets start with the impact on fire systems of having either hot or cold aisle containment. The safety of personel working [...]
When was the last time you saw a Data Center press release that didn’t make some green or energy efficiency claim? I guess because data centers are such huge energy hogs vendors must worry that building a new one will raise the hackles of the environmentalists. Nevertheless PR agencies should really stop dressing up stories [...]
The Hot Aisle reader, Mark Hatton of Trapdoor dropped me a mail a few days ago about a company based in Las Vegas called Switch Communications and the CEO, Rob Roy was making a lot of claims about how good their proposed new data center was. You can read the original article in The Register. [...]
I have had a great interchange from a subscriber to The Hot Aisle:- Darek Wichniewicz of ATM SA in Warsaw, Poland. Darek is looking for some real technical advice on building a new Data Center facility of 2000 – 3000 square meters utilizing fresh air cooling. Like many Data Center operators Darek is concerned about being [...]
Zinc whiskers, although a catastrophic problem, are not new (they were discovered in 1948 by Bell Labs). They grow on many zinc coated components and structures commonly used in Data Centers. Zinc coating is used to slow the rusting of steel components. There are two types of zinc coating, Hot Dipped Galvanized (HDG) or electroplated. Only one [...]
Floor loading is a badly understood issue in Data Centers. Not just in the place where the equipment eventually ends up but also en-route from the loading bay to the final resting place.
OK, so lets start looking at the problem. Most data centers have a raised floor made of specialist tiles held up on struts and a [...]
You might think that your data center is under the spotlight, constantly monitored, secure and well designed but what if I told you that typically the second most common cause of catastrophic failures (after electrical) in your Data Center are water leaks?
Water can come from three main sources:
Leaks inside the Data Center from refrigeration equipment [...]
The basis of intelligent cooling is that it allows us to deliver only the cooling that is required to meet our temperature requirements. By reducing the flow of air down to that which is actually needed (rather than just blowing as fast as we can) it is possible to reduce the energy demand of our [...]
Data Centre Basics
There are some basics that just need to be done to keep a data centre efficient and as green as possible. Maintaining the floor is often a task that is left too late. Gaps and unnecessary holes in the floor are bad news and lead to the mixing of hot and cold [...]
How did we get to the modern data centre design? Why do most data centres look the same? Why are they so inefficient in how they consume electrical power? Why do they typically have a raised plenum floor and air handling units that keep air at fixed temperature ranges and humidity levels?
I guess the first [...]
