Analyzing the Cooling Efficiency of the Thermal Environment in Data Centers

Abstract

Given the explosive growth of data, scalability and fault tolerance have become a fundamental challenge for data center network structures. Temperature in data centers significantly affects the failure ratio of high-speed network devices. Various types of air distribution schemes influence the temperature of network equipment differently, and the cooling cost in data centers dominates the overall energy cost. On the basis of the energy efficiency of cooling systems, this study analyzes and compares the thermal load distribution in the enclosure of standard and non-standard data centers by considering the effects of the external environment. Analysis results demonstrate that the external environment significantly affects the thermal load of non-standard data centers. By leveraging on the air temperature outside data centers and on the inlet/outlet of IT equipment, the air temperature and return air temperature of air conditioning are calculated when performing hot and cold aisle containment. The calculations indicate that sealing an appropriate aisle (hot or cold aisle) can significantly reduce the energy consumption of cooling systems in terms of the external air temperature outside data centers. Furthermore, if the air temperature outside data centers is higher than the temperature at the inlet of IT equipment, sealing the cold aisle outperforms sealing the hot aisle. By contrast, the aisle to be sealed depends on the energy efficiency ratio of the air conditioning.