Benefits of properly sealing a cold aisle containment system

Data centers are mission-critical facilities and the nerve center of successful business operations. Surging demand for processing power, work load virtualization and consolidation is increasing data center heat loads, making the thermal management of data centers challenging. Containing the air in a data center is an important energy savings strategy towards data center optimization. Most of the modern, energy efficient, data centers deploy some kind of containment system. This paper discusses test data for a Cold Aisle Containment (CAC) system and compares it with a standard Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle (HA/CA) configuration. The HA/CA configuration is shown to support a heat load of 14.6kW/cabinet while the CAC system was tested up to 25.2 kW/cabinet. In addition, the test data demonstrated the cooling energy savings with the CAC system. Furthermore, we quantified the importance and effectiveness of sealing accessories (i.e. grommets for cable openings and blanking panels) when deployed in a CAC environment.