Cabinet level prediction of IT deployment in operational condition changes

In traditional data centers chilled air flow is delivered to the IT equipment through the raised floor plenum and perforated tiles. Variation of power load in different racks in the same aisle increases the possibility of over cooling of some IT and hot spots in others. Additional solutions like cold and hot aisle containment, chimneys, etc are employed to prevent the mixture of hot and cold air in data centers. In order to avoid this problem, localized hybrid cooling solutions are used in recently designed data centers. By putting the cooling source closer to the heat load, the localized cooling capacity is more controllable and this significantly increases the energy efficiency. On the other hand, data center energy efficiency is not the only consideration, but other operational conditions need to be considered. In the current study, a commercial hybrid cooled, enclosed server cabinet is studied empirically and numerically. The CFD numerical model used here has been validated with different steady-state cases in an earlier study. In the model, the cabinet is made up of different parts such as: IT equipment (servers and server simulator), multifunction rear door, heat exchanger box, recirculation deflector and side panels. Each part is characterized and validated based on experimental results. The total heat that was generated by the IT is removed by a V-shaped heat exchanger that is located within the cabinet. The performance of the system was investigated at different operational stages.