containment is a critical aspect of any well managed data centre
modulan enabled configurations optimise your climate and save energy.
Not all containment is equal
Soaring electricity prices means it’s more important than ever for businesses to assess energy usage and operational effectiveness. The demands for streaming drive IT processing up, accelerating energy requirements needed to cool IT equipment and costing business’ thousands. Data centres contribute a huge part of this energy consumption.
Data centre containment and cooling is essential but not all containment is equal and most businesses don’t know that a combination of the right containment and cooling configuration will save them many thousands of dollars every year. Many businesses install containment and automatically assume their energy usage will be cut, while others tinker with the cooling configuration and disregard the impact of air mixing.
Containment, when deployed with an holistic approach, delivers the benefit of eliminating air mixing in the room and getting a more constant and consistent air temperature into their IT equipment. Plus, typically it will give greater energy efficiency too.
A managed approach to airflow management will effectively reduce the power consumption of a data centre and will result in significant cost benefits. Investing in a holistic containment solution that entails consideration of your cooling equipment and configuration, will contribute to a company’s CSR policy, without compromising system resilience and extending equipment life.
Holistic solution
A holistic, engineered approach to air containment is the best strategy for your data centre. As with our design process, we thoroughly assess the containment needs for your data centre, whether you are building a greenfield or brownfield site. We have a process which tracks and records floor pressure, temperature at the racks and cooling equipment, IT loads and estimated cooling equipment capacities to determine any efficiency gaps and inform the recommendations for containment solutions.
We also recommend implementing real time monitoring systems to tweak fan speeds and adjust environmental settings of the computer room air conditioning equipment to reach the optimum balance between SLAs and efficiencies. For implementation, we partner directly with Stulz in order to deliver complete end-to-end cooling, racks and containment solutions.
sample of modulan’s containment solutions
Single-row concepts
- As stand-alone solution
- For an uneven number of rows
Freestanding enclosures
If you use freestanding enclosures, the cold aisle containment is built prior to the cabinets. Later on, single cabinets can easily be docked to the cold aisle containment without infringing the climatic efficiency of the system in any way.
Variable containment elements
If you wish to include new cabinets into the cold aisle containment at a later point in time, the variable containment elements can easily make way for the new rack. However, the width of the new rack might be different from the width of the former cover element. No problem whatsoever with the modulan solution! The removed element is used to seal off the containment, because all elements are designed to be mounted variably within the frame and so the elements can be placed right next to the new rack and seal to the containment.
Lateral cold air shaft
1. Sidewise Containment – Special dummy covers seal off any dead space, even lateral dead space.
2. Containment to the Back – An air baffle, mounted to the back of the rack, prevents hot air from entering the containment.
3. Custom-Made Containments – Custom-made containments guarantee compatibility with any kind of switch mode