Effectiveness of rack-level containment in removing data center hot-spots

Concerted efforts are being made by data center professionals to ensure that data centers are made more sustainable by reducing energy consumption. The combination of increasing IT workloads and packaging densities place stringent requirements on data center cooling systems. Various traditional airflow management technologies have been implemented that propose significant energy savings as well as reduce net annual cost involved in running data centers. In this work, the concept of using rack-level containment has been explored as an alternative airflow management strategy and may prove to be appropriate for specific data center configurations and applications. A parametric study of a 1008 ft² baseline data center with 161 kW of IT load is used as an example for CFD analysis, comparing the effectiveness of using individual rack containment, snorkels to remove hotspots by directing and aiming cool air from the sub-floor plenum to the inlet of cabinets, hence minimizing inlet temperatures. Over 40 CFD cases have been analyzed in this paper and the relative magnitudes of inlet temperature reduction and cooling improvements with this procedure have been quantified. Test cases involving simulations run for comparisons with traditional hot-aisle/cold-aisle containment systems, different combinations of containment strategies as well as for varying rack density distributions in the data center model have also been included. The results present the feasibility of this strategy as a preliminary review and give an initial guideline on when this concept can be implemented, depending on the respective data center layout and design.