Legrand Cabinets and Containment Business is a leading provider to the multi-service and broadband industry. Our engineering teams are focused on assisting our MSO customers in applying best practices and lessons learned from working with our massive base of mission-critical data center customers worldwide.
Our suggested approaches to achieving enhanced efficiency and sustained operability include the following:
- Blanking panels & Air Dams
- Air Switch Duct kits
- Containment
How do you calculate data center efficiency?
Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE is determined by dividing the total amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the IT equipment within it.
What do you gain by properly managing airflow?
Power and cooling technologies can help you identify potential disruptions, prevent damaging downtime and keep your data center running even if disaster strikes.
A plan that maximizes the efficiency of your resource usage can help you reduce the considerable costs of powering and cooling your data center.
Recirculation air is bypass air's partner in crime. When an insufficient amount of supply air is delivered to the equipment inside the cabinets, the server fans pull air (CFMIT) from the most immediate source -- the warm air circulating nearby. The more significant the proportion of the flow that goes to bypass, the larger the amount made up by recirculation air will be.
What can I do to improve airflow and gain cooling efficiency?
It's easy to forget that bypass and recirculation can occur inside cabinets. An airflow management system cannot effectively cool the equipment in a cabinet without eliminating internal paths of bypass and recirculation. Blanking panels reduce these air flows and are considered necessary for proper airflow inside a cabinet. Blanking panels are frequently removed and not replaced during installation, plus with the removal of hardware, it makes sense for the IT staff to populate equipment from the bottom of the cabinet up. Ensuring there are no gaps between servers, minimizing internal recirculation.
A single unprotected opening of approximately 12" x 6" can bypass enough air to reduce the system cooling capacity by 1 KW of cabinet load. When each cabinet has a cable cutout, a large proportion of the cooling capacity is lost to bypass.
Sealing the spaces between the raised floors and room walls is a no-brainer. Those gaps are easily identified by a simple visual inspection.
Network switches from leading manufacturers often employ "side to side" or hybrid "side to side/front to rear" airflow for proper heat dissipation. This can create less than optimal operating conditions in data centers employing Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle cooling or aisle containment systems. Our engineered and field-tested TMSDs ensure optimal operation and continuous availability of critical network equipment. Legrand's thermal switch duct kits help route supply and exhaust airflow within the cabinet to minimize bypass, mixing, and recirculation.