The Containment Chronicles

San Diego Gets Hot

Cary — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 01:07:41 +0000

We recently finished a new construction Hot Aisle Containment project for a health care company in San Diego. We worked with a Design/Build firm who prepared the below plans.

Plan View Drawings for Hot Aisle Containment Layout

Polargy created shop drawings from these plans to prepare a material list and installation instructions.

Shop Drawing of Hot Aisle Containment

The finished project looks great.

San Diego Hot Aisle Containment

Here is another view.

San Diego Hot Aisle Containment Corner View

Quick Wins Are Always Nice

Cary — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:08:54 +0000

“I just thought I’d let you know that we got the Polargy doors and top panels installed today, and saw an immediate drop of about 8-10 F in the cold aisle.”

Cold Aisle Containment

?#@*&%! Side-to-Side Air

Cary — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:47:28 +0000

We all continue to struggle with containing “side-to-side” air on the 6500s. We stumbled upon this fix last year in San Jose, CA. The owner reports sufficient air supply with this simple hose and manifold set up.

Cold Air Piped into Cisco 6500s

Is that my dryer exhaust hose?

Here is a little less sophisticated approach on a newer switch at a site in New Jersey.

HP Launches New Air Containment Product

Canada Keeps Cool

Cary — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:22:18 +0000

In 2011 Polargy installed a Cold Aisle Containment System for the Government of Canada. Below is a note and photos from the Data Center Manager who is a very satisfied customer.

————————————————————-

Good Morning Cary,

I only have good things to say about your product. It solved our cooling issues in a snap!!!

We only went with your product after studying all alternative. One main feature of your product is the simplicity of the system and the ease to work with it during installation (minutes) and when maintenance have to be perform in the Data Center where the top panels have to be moved around. It proved such a success with all our staff. For the one concern about aesthetic, well the design is pretty slick if you ask me.

I don’t have the official tally from the CRAC units but my first investigation show that we are now saving more then 50% from our past cooling needs.

As we continue our expansion, you will hear from us in the future

Sincerely

Louis Hall

Moncton Data Centre / Centre Informatique de Moncton
Infrastructure Services / Services d’infrastructure
Innovation, Information and Technology / Innovation, information et technologie
Human Resources and Skills Development Canada / Ressources humaines et Développement des compétences Canada
Government of Canada / Gouvernement du Canada

Government of Canada Cold Aisle Containment

Government of Canada Inside Cold Aisle Containment Pod

It’s Cold in Jamaica

Cary — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 20:09:28 +0000

Power is expensive in the Caribbean so data center efficiency is all the more important. Modern Power and Cooling Technology Limited successfully designed and implemented a cold aisle containment solution at the state of the art tier 3 Digicel Collocation Facility at Caymans using Polargy’s Aisle Containment System with the one of a kind “drop away” panel. A few classic site conditions were columns down the aisles, uneven aisle ends, and a single sided aisle. What is most impressive is that the design was done locally by Modern Power and they installed the system with no difficulties.

Cold Aisle Roof

Inside the isolated cold aisle

Go to Modern’s Press Release to see more details.

Xcel Energy’s $169,000 Rebate Check

Cary — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 19:47:11 +0000

What a great outcome, the CFO must be thrilled.

Big Fat Rebate Check

This cold aisle containment project enjoyed pure simplicity.

The site, near Denver, was purpose built so Xcel Energy could just take a before and after meter reading for the entire building. The IT load did not really change over the course of the project, so the reduction was attributed to the shutting off of 39 CRAC units out of 70 units running. This reduction was measured at 435kW, or about 11kW per CRAC unit. These CRAC units were the old AirFlow brand and the per unit reduction was higher than anticipated but we double checked the meter readings and verified the constant IT load (via the UPS) to confirm the numbers.

Old Airflow CRAC Badge

The containment was a combination of cold aisle containment, under floor partitions, and CRAC unit extensions. PUE before was 2.0, after it was 1.8.

Polargy helped calculate the ROI. The project’s net costs were $400K ($569K less $169K). The 435kW savings yielded $225K annually (power rate is about 6 cents per kWh). This results in a project payback period of 1.6 years.

Vanderbilt Shows Off at AFCOM

Cary — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:24:17 +0000

Vanderbilt contributed to the AFCOM event with a tour of its latest energy savings efforts in its Nashville data center. The university installed Polargy’s Cold Aisle Containment System on one of its newly installed aisles. 73 people toured through the site and experienced the containment system as shown below.

Our friend Jeff showing how the sliding door works:

Taking a peak inside the contained cold aisle. The site has a glass brick wall which is illuminating the wall above the CRAC unit, a neat look.

Inside the Aisle

Pixar’s “Ridiculous” ROI on Cold Aisle Containment

Cary — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:44:20 +0000

Jay (now at Twitter) presented Pixar’s results from Polargy’s Cold Aisle Containment installation. This is a simple and compelling story on containment’s ease of implementation and rapid ROI.

Bernoulli Makes Curtains Dance

Cary — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:17:41 +0000

One problem we have seen with curtains on cold aisles is the flapping or drawing in of the curtains due to the airflow through the adjacent perforated tiles. Sometimes people call this the “dancing curtain problem.” The Bernoulli effect (air plane wing effect) of lower pressure on the side of the higher air velocity causes this. This flapping can push the curtains close to the server intakes and then the suction of the intakes can suck the curtains onto them, blocking and essentially starving the servers. We caught this blocking three times before we adopted a policy of avoiding curtains on cold aisles.

After examining this and having the good fortune of a customer doing some testing we concluded that flapping curtains are not a fuction of air balance in the contained zone. Rather, it is a function of turbulence caused by the airflow through the nearby tiles. So, even if one has an oversupply of air, the curtains just don’t push out gently as one might expect.

We tried adding weights to the curtains to prevent their movement, but this only resulted in heavy flying objects banging into the servers. Ultimately, we added two solid panels to the sides of the strip door. By the time we did this, the cost was about the same as a sliding door like the one pictured below.

Sliding Door Preferred Over Curtains for CAC

The design approaches to combat the flapping curtains include:

Hot aisle containment – there is no air flow from the floor
Sliding doors – they don’t move
Solid floor tiles at ends of rows – no nearby air movement
Extended containment perimeter – basically place doors away from aisle end in some manner

Containment’s Gas Suppression Challenge

Cary — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:47:42 +0000

Existing data centers protected with FM200 or other clean agent systems can be a challenge to contain because the cost of adding or moving nozzles is very high. One alternative has been the use of electronic fuse links that trigger off the FM200 system. Though the links are pricey (about $250 each) and need testing, it is a workable solution that can still offer an ROI that meets project goals.

Electronic Fuse Links

The electronic links pictured above where installed on a hot aisle containment system pictured below. The site has a ceiling with two levels and the FM200 nozzles are installed in the lower section of the ceiling. The curtains were installed with a gap above them to allow some air movement (so not total isolation) in order to assure that air flow to the existing smoke detectors were not obstructed.

Hot Aisle Containment

These links have an electronic trigger off a signal from the FM200 system as well as a thermally activated mechanism. The wiring requirements are similar to those for smoke detectors and is through conduit that you can see in the above picture. The other wires are tethers to stop the fall of the curtain after it drops about two feet to clear the FM200 nozzles.