One of the most frustrating and difficult functions of an IT manager is to ensure the efficiency of the data centre, especially when it comes to maximising the capacity and air flow of the cooling system.
Although many racking manufacturers have been successful in producing racks that are purpose built and satisfy specific requirements, the increased pressure on the data centre with respect to cooling capacity, uniformity in rack configuration and the need to lower the cost of moves, additions and changes, has driven manufacturers to develop new rack technologies that have given birth to a new ‘generic’ rack design.
There are a variety of different architectures used within the data centre and the equipment ranges from legacy systems to the very latest rack-mounted technologies. The principles of hot aisle/cold aisle are well documented throughout the industry and strict enforcement of this is necessary to ensure the cold air supply and hot air return are separated. To ensure this, all the racks need to be properly designed to facilitate the correct airflow. The ICT vendors all design their own racks to support their own ICT equipment and mixing of different vendors’ equipment in proprietary cabinets is not acceptable; however, a generic rack can simplify the movement of equipment, optimise the data centre layout and allow a far longer depreciation period as the cabinet can be re-used long after the original installed equipment is obsolete.
Equipment cabinets in the data centre can be broken down into the following categories:
* Proprietary cabinets and equipment enclosures – these are typically used to house enterprise class equipment and are purposely designed to provide the correct levels of protection, isolation, insulation and cooling.
* Passive network cabinets – used to house UTP and fibre patch panels and cabling distribution. These cabinets are designed for the management of large volumes of cable, patch panels and patch leads. They have no active or powered equipment.
* Active network cabinets – these are used for the networking equipment. Different types of network equipment have very specific requirements for cooling – in some cases it is not simply a case of providing a cold air intake at the front of the equipment cabinet and hot at the rear. Certain legacy Cisco cabinets ventilate from front to back and side to side at the same time.
* Low density server cabinets – these are typically used for servers that have low power consumption and therefore a low requirement for cooling.
* Medium density server cabinets – as the power consumption increases in the cabinet, the demands for air cooling may soon exceed the ability of the room’s CRAC units to supply enough cooled air in the cold aisle. These cabinets can operate at the maximum permissible air temperature in the data centre.
* High density server cabinets – these cabinets are used when the heat dissipation exceeds the ability for the typical air cooled system to effectively cool the rack. Another medium such as water or pumped refrigerant is used via a precision cooling unit.
To this end, Modrac has introduced the SMARTRAC range of high density cabinets.
When embarking on a data centre build, green fields or an upgrade, the IT manager needs to ensure the range of cabinets he chooses to deploy can:
1. Be used as traditional server cabinets, but must
2. Be easily reconfigured at minimal cost, by simply changing internal components into networking or distribution type cabinets.
3. Be utilised in the traditional hot aisle/cold aisle configuration.
4. Be upgraded by addition of supplemental cooling (in-row cooling).
5. Be contained either with cold aisle containment or hot aisle thermal management.
6. Be contained in closed loop, self-contained PODs, which have no effect on the environment from either a heating or cooling perspective.
No matter which technology is being deployed, or what the kW cooling and power reticulation requirements are, one of the most important decisions that IT managers need to make today, is to ensure that whichever racking system they are going to use, it must not only conform today, but must be future proof to match growing requirements of not only 10 Gig, but future proofing for 40 Gig and then the ever increasing 100 Gig ready solutions of tomorrow.
Modrac is manufactured in Wynberg and distributed locally by Datanet Infrastructure Group.
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