One of the key contributing factor towards efficiency and energy savings in data centers is preventing the mixing of hot and cold air, i.e. better air management and distribution. This can be accomplished through a containment strategy. Some vendors have products which allows containment of a single individual rack, while others offers containment of a group of racks. Whenever a discussion about containment of a group of racks, often we would hear about debates on the merits and virtues of cold-aisle versus hot-aisle containment and vice-versa.
Most of the time, many fail to realise that it is necessary to take into consideration the cooling architecture whenever we speak about containment. Both are closely related.
I’ve written a short paper providing a comparison of the two containment strategies across the 3 cooling architectures (room-oriented, row-oriented and rack-oriented). You can read the paper here: Comparison of CAC vs HAC.
The picture on the left is an example of a data center on slab floor (this is Sun’s Santa Clara data center). The theory behind cooling such a facility is to bring the cooling closer to the heat source and deliver it horizontally (row-based) or vertically (rack-based), instead of distributing over the sub-floor.
