If you were wondering what the data center has to do with the central station business, look around. Central stations have become data centers in and of their own rights; and their capacities will expand as monitoring of services and remote technologies continue on the upswing. Cooling and air distribution have become crucial for central stations.

When legacy cooling systems were designed, air delivery methods were totally reliant on a “chaos air distribution strategy.” Massive amounts of cool air were supplied through a jet stream to stir up stagnant or warm air in the data center. This supply of air cooled the IT equipment and moved warm air mass to the A/C return, or away from IT inlets. The hope was that the newly supplied, jet streamed air would reach all of the data center’s IT equipment -- relying on the same chaos strategy, the air conditioning system -- would extract the warm air generated by the IT equipment. The strategy didn’t work because increasing data loads kept driving up the amount of warm air present.

The vendor-based community responded to this challenge. Many ascertained that best-in-class data centers should employ a hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement of the IT racks. A short time later, as the IT loads continued to grow the problem became how to make the recently adopted hot/cold aisle system perform better.

Hot aisle versus cold

This “tale” of data center cooling was built on false assumptions and poor problem analysis. The hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement sounded like a good idea, but proved less than ideal for keeping pace with the cooling demands of high density equipment and added unwanted data center constraints and lack of flexibility for the manager.

A wider group on the supply side of the data center industry was quick to join the hot aisle/cold aisle movement. (After all, who doesn’t want to be part of the next great thing?) That thing turned out to be the supply side’s introduction of a new cooling platform that was dependent on the hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement and became a platform for a new industry segment called “supplemental cooling.”

Some of these products consumed additional floor space or made it impossible to pass interconnections of data cables from rack to rack, forcing the use of longer cables and additional rack-based exit/entry holes. Other supplemental cooling products created environmental health hazards.

The root of the problem is the chaos model of air distribution. What today’s data center needs is a simple, scalable and organized air flow system.