Comparative Analysis of Different Data Center Airflow Management Configurations

Abstract

Increase in computing power resulting from high performance microprocessors, packages, and modules and the deployment of high heat load computer rack units in high density configurations, has escalated the thermal challenges in today’s data center systems. One of the key issues is the location of hot recirculation regions in the room and the mixing of hot rack exhaust air with the cold supply air. Along with many factors such as the rack heat load and the cooling capacity of the supply air, the data center thermal management architecture plays an important role in determining the reliability of the electronic equipment and the general thermal performance of the data center. There are several candidate configurations available for the air ducting designs for data centers. The overall energy efficiency of the system is highly dependant upon the selection of the specific configuration. This paper will summarize the results of a broad numerical study carried out to assess the effectiveness of different data center configurations. The numerical modeling is performed using a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code based on finite volume approach. The configurations studied include different combinations of raised floor and ceiling supply and return vent location subject to specific constraints. The performance of the data center has been characterized on the basis of average and maximum mean region rack inlet air temperature. Among the seven different configurations compared, the raised floor/ceiling return type configuration is found to be the most effective configuration for the given set of constraints and assumptions.

Holistic Virtual Machine Scheduling in Cloud Datacenters towards Minimizing Total Energy

“…They consider the overall energy consumption in datacenters, and select the appropriate cooling temperature set point to reach the best compromise between energy consumption of chillers and servers. Different airflow configurations within a datacenter was studied by [10], who compared different airflow configurations and concluded that the vertical cooling schema "raised floor & ceiling return" was the most effective. Further studies show that datacenter racks with vertically placed servers attain enhanced cooling efficiency when vertical cooling schema is adopted [41].…”

“…There are several candidate configurations available for the air ducting designs for datacenters [10], referred as Supply and Return Schema. Without loss of generality, we consider the "raised floor & ceiling return" schema, which is demonstrated as the best option in datacenter design.…”

“…The energy consumed by each CRAC during time interval [t1, t2] comprises compressor (i.e. a component of the CARC, responsible for air compression) energy and fan energy [10], [11].…”

Optimizing data center cooling infrastructures using exergothermovolumes

“…Although other configurations exist [12][13] -including, increasingly, the notion of 'containment' within aisles to minimize recirculation of hot air into the cold aisle or vice versa [14][15] -the open raised-floor architecture of figure 1 is most common and will therefore be the focus of this paper.…”

A combined cooling solution for high heat density data centers using multi-stage heat pipe loops

“…Rambo and Joshi [13,14] studied characteristics of turbulence air flow in data centers using RANS model, and performed detailed thermal simulation inside racks. Shrivastava et al [15] used a multi-scale CFD model to evaluate the cooling effectiveness of data centers with under floor plenum and roof diffusers. Iyengar et al [16] performed a similar study without under floor plenum, to compare rack intake air temperature by changing rack layout and diffuser position.…”