Abstract
Removing heat from high-density information technology (IT) equipment is essential for data centers. Maintaining the proper operating environment for IT equipment can be expensive. Rising energy cost and energy consumption has prompted data centers to consider hot aisle and cold aisle containment strategies, which can improve the energy efficiency and maintain the recommended level of inlet air temperature to IT equipment. It can also resolve hot spots in traditional uncontained data centers to some degree. This study analyzes the IT environment of the hot aisle containment (HAC) system, which has been considered an essential solution for high-density data centers. The thermal performance was analyzed for an IT server room with HAC in a reference data center. Computational fluid dynamics analysis was conducted to compare the operating performances of the cooling air distribution systems applied to the raised and hard floors and to examine the difference in the IT environment between the server rooms. Regarding operating conditions, the thermal performances in a state wherein the cooling system operated normally and another wherein one unit had failed were compared. The thermal performance of each alternative was evaluated by comparing the temperature distribution, airflow distribution, inlet air temperatures of the server racks, and recirculation ratio from the outlet to the inlet. In conclusion, the HAC system with a raised floor has higher cooling efficiency than that with a hard floor. The HAC with a raised floor over a hard floor can improve the air distribution efficiency by 28%. This corresponds to 40% reduction in the recirculation ratio for more than 20% of the normal cooling conditions. The main contribution of this paper is that it realistically implements the effectiveness of the existing theoretical comparison of the HAC system by developing an accurate numerical model of a data center with a high-density fifth-generation (5G) environment and applying the operating conditions.
Highlights
With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, data are the key for future industrial development and their importance and activation plans have been actively discussed [1]
The hot aisle containment (HAC) with a raised floor over a hard floor can improve the air distribution efficiency by 28%. This corresponds to 40% reduction in the recirculation ratio for more than 20% of the normal cooling conditions
The main contribution of this paper is that it realistically implements the effectiveness of the existing theoretical comparison of the HAC system by developing an accurate numerical model of a data center with a high-density fifth-generation (5G)
Summary
With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, data are the key for future industrial development and their importance and activation plans have been actively discussed [1]. Since data have been generated in large quantities due to the expansion of new businesses, such as cloud, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT), the importance of data centers to process the data has been increasing [2,3]. Hyper-scale data centers are increasing at a global level. Hyper-scale data centers are significantly larger than the existing legacy data centers and they have. A hyper-scale data center generally operates approximately 100,000 information technology (IT) servers and has a size of more than 20,000 m2 with flexible scalability [4]. The number of hyper-scale data centers worldwide in 2017 increased by 14.2% in comparison with the previous year. The number of hyper-scale data centers increased to 448 in 2018 and it is expected to increase by
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