Thermal Environment under the Partial Aisle Containment in Data Center

In recent years, a heat generation of ICT equipment has been significantly increasing in data centers. Intake and outlet airflow of ICT equipment are being separated with aisle containment in data centers. Following effects of aisle containment were confirmed by conducting experiments in a data center with raised floor.1)The temperature setting of air conditioning systems can be raised, which leads to a reduction in energy consumption of heat sources such as the chiller and turbo refrigerator.2)The air volume of the Air handling unit (AHU) can be set lower, which leads to reduced energy consumption.3)The rising temperature rate in the cold aisle can be slowed when the air conditioning system stops working during a power outage.These effects were confirmed under the condition where aisle containment is installed in every aisle in the server room. However, all the server racks are not necessarily installed at the completion of data center’s construction. The server racks are installed as needed depending on the data center customers. In this case, it is not known whether the benefits of aisle containment will be realized or not. Therefore, the experiment results which evaluated the cold aisle temperature under the "Partial Aisle Containment" condition are reported in this paper.The results of the experiments show that the effect of aisle containment cannot be realized under the "Partial Aisle Containment" condition. What is worse, the ICT equipment without aisle containment could face forced shutdown because of rising air temperatures during a power outage. To prevent the "Partial Aisle Containment" condition, it is desirable that all the server racks are installed at the completion of data center’s construction and aisle containment is installed in every single aisle at the same time. Otherwise some measures should be taken such as establishing guidelines for aisle containment installation when adding server racks.