Data Center Products

Cold Aisle containment systems are very common in perimeter CRAC/CRAH unit cooling designs. Some of the advantages include easy access to wires and cables, and a reduction in the amount of space you need to cool since the air is trapped only in that aisle. However, a significant amount of leakage can occur through the servers themselves. Tate conducted a study of 10 commonly used servers from 5 leading manufacturer’s and found that in off and idle modes between 300-600 CFM of bypass air can be forced through a full rack of servers.

SmartAire® P or (pressure sensing) variable-air-volume damper is ideal for contained aisles or enclosed racks with equipment that have a variable load profile. Using constant airflow into a contained system with variable loads will waste energy during times of non peak load performance from airflow being forced through spaces around the racks and containment structure. As static pressure builds the air will also be forced through servers even if the fans are idle or off. This wasted energy can be solved with the use of SmartAire P.

By installing SmartAire® P under a portion of the airflow panels in the cold aisle the airflow can be varied based on a desired static pressure. When servers enter an idle state they will draw less air from the contained system causing the static pressure in the aisle to increase. The SmartAire® P is daisy chained to SmartAire® C units for a primary/secondary configuration that will automatically modulate all the dampers in the aisle to control the static pressure to maintain a user defined set point.